Need calendar software to operate inside and outside your organization? Google Calendar is a wonderful solution. It provides users with the ability to share their personal calendar with business associates, friends, family, and the rest of their organization, but there is more potential. Advertise your events by publicly showcasing your organization’s calendar. Google lets you search their online calendar database so you can track national events, whether they are for conferences or other announcements. See what LSNTAP is doing and when by copying and pasting the LSNTAP Training iCal feed.
By using Google’s package, you are given the power to set the default privacy controls inside your organization. When someone joins your staff, they don’t need to request individually from every staff member to share their calendar with them. They can simply copy and paste their iCal links for whomever they need, and those calendars are now listed in their account. Having one person do the labor is much easier than getting dozens of people to send you their calendar. If you would prefer that others didn’t see your entire schedule, Google allows events to be labeled private. These will show times when you are busy, but no other details, unless you make them public.
Events from other calendar software may be imported to a Google calendar. Any calendar program that can export events into a CSV file (Outlook Express, Weboffice) can be moved to a Google calendar. ICal may also be used to do this.
Google Calendar Offline
What do you do when you don’t have internet access? The biggest issue in the past with Google’s Calendar software is that it requires online access. Not any more. Using either an open-source calendar client or a proprietary one, most can be synchronized with Google Calendar through a useful hack.
Syncing with Microsoft Outlook
The only calendar client that Google provides the ability to synchronize with your Google Calendar is Microsoft’s Outlook. They offer 2-way and 1-way syncing so you can have the choice to either edit through Outlook or online with Google Calendar. The current issue with doing this is that you can only sync your account’s master calendar to outlook, so your other calendars will not appear. Read more about it here: http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955
Syncing with Other Clients
For users interested in using one of the open-source calendars with Google’s program, there is a special add-on just for you. GCalDaemon is an open-source project designed to do this very feat. It can be IT heavy to implement, but once done, is a very welcome addition. It works with Mozilla Sunbird and Lightning. You can now make changes offline, and they will take effect when your internet connection returns. This will also let your client give you time and date notifications without always being connected to Google Apps.
Features in Google Calendar
- Check Guest and Resource Availability with Education or Premium Google App Editions
- Create Repeating Events (weekly, monthly)
- Make events private or public
- Give other Google Calendar users write access to your personal calendar
- Publish public or private iCal feeds
- Locate dates and times with Google’s Integrated Search Engine
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