You use a dozen different devices from your workstations to
the PDAs, with different schedule managers in each. At work, it's probably
your e-mail client that doubles up for the job, and at home or in your PDA, you
have other software. The challenge before you is to have identical calendar data
in each, without the hassle of manually synching them (which
is prone to forgetful memories). Google
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Calendar is an online centralized way to achieve this,
without necessarily sacrificing the existing schedule managers you use. This
calendar lets you import (no export as yet) calendars from any PIM in ICAL or
CSV format and use the resulting calendar from any device that can read XML off
the Internet. To start with, go to http://calendar.google.com and sign in with
your Gmail account. On the screen you start off by
specifying a name and description for your calendar. Doing so will enable others
search and locate your calendar and events easily.
1 |
Selecting 'Do not share with everyone' makes your calendar private, though you can still give people selective access using the 'Add a new person' section |
2 |
In the 'Manage calendars' screen at the bottom of the 'My calendars' box, you can create a number of calendars as well as add other people's calendars |
3 | You can set up how you wish to be notified (e-mail/pop-up) about upcoming appointments and schedule events |
4 |
Export the information from your existing PIM and use the 'Select File' field in this screen to upload it to Google |
5 | Enter information about the calendar event (schedule item). If you enter some names in the Guests box, Google will invite them and manage their accept/reject messages | 6 | Use the Agenda view to see a snapshot of all upcoming events, in a particular calendar or across all of them. Each calendar's events are color-coded |
7 | The regular calendar view will list each calendar's event in a different color. You can set up your own color scheme too | 8 | Copy the URL to the RSS feed from the Public/Private feeds on the Settings>General page into RSS feed readers |
9 | The feed reader can help you do further things with the calendar event, like blogging it to your corporate blog | 10 | When other invitees to your events accept or reject the invitation, the status becomes visible here immediately |
Sujay V Sarma