The Server Room

Google Calendar

I’ve been playing with the new Google Calendar (calendar.google.com) for the last few days and it’s rather swish. A couple of niggles make it seem slightly beta, but my overall feeling is that could be useful for all sorts of situations.

Within secondary education I can’t see that people would want to use it internally if they already have in-house shared calendaring (from Outlook etc). For external use it would be nice to publish a calendar with the dates of term and significant events such as school trips, shows and even exams so that parents can subscribe and stay
informed. Primaries may want to use it for their internal calendaring needs if they aren’t provided with a (suitable) solution by their LEA.

Nice features:

• Selective sharing with other Google Calendar users - Add people you know (based on their email address) to view/change/manage individual calendars or just see your free/busy status. If they don’t have a Calendar account, it offers to send an invite. I found it a tad unnerving that I could add a gmail address and it would happily give me the user’s real name even before they’d accepted.
• Search public calendars - Search within the text of calendars published on Google, the Apple calendar site (ical.mac.com) and elsewhere on the web. You can also make your calendars public and searchable. There had to be a search element somewhere, right?
• Quick add - Click the quick add link and type “Boozing on Friday” and it’ll stick an event in your default calendar next Friday. Even smarter though, I tested it with “Boozing on Friday at noon” and it scheduled an event from midday to 1pm. Even more than that, “Boozing on Friday at noon at the Kings Arms” will put in an item as before, but also fill in the location field AND link to a maps.google.com map of places called “The Kings Arms” near me. Stunning.

Things needing polish:

• SMS Notifications - US Only?! Come on Google, you have sms.google.co.uk and that works fine. When this comes for us Brits it’ll be pretty handy (not sure if it’ll cost anything though)
• Printable Calendars - The print-friendly function is a nice feature, but it sometimes produces really badly formatted calendars, particularly in “month view”, because the number of weeks being printed out isn’t a constant.
• Event Reminder Buttons - There are detailed instructions on producing reminder buttons for your website/blog, but they require manual assembly of a nasty URL string. Surely it would take a Google employee about 20 minutes to make a form that generates the HTML snippet. The form could handle validation/escaping for disallowed characters as well, which Google currently provide a (not so) handy lookup table for. Fixed! Thanks Google!
• Importing Calendars - Calendars can be imported in ical/vcal format from Outlook or iCal which is a nice feature. It seems that Google are explicitly allowing only those two programs at the moment. I tried importing a calendar file from Mozilla Sunbird and it failed first time:
  Failed to import events:
Failed to upload ical/csv file

  When I changed the code for the software that generated it from:-//Mozilla.org/NONSGML Mozilla Calendar V1.0//EN

  to-//Apple Computer\, Inc//iCal 2.0//EN 

  it worked flawlessly. Result!

My wishlist:

• User Groups - I’d like to be able to give access to view a calendar to a predefined list of people rather than adding each one individually to each calendar. Google does speed the process up a touch by remembering addresses you’ve used before and prompting as-you-type.
• Quickly Select Weeks - In the mini calendar that lets you jump to a date, you can quickly pick a month view (click “April 2006″) or a day view (click “14″), but they haven’t provided a way to get to the week view. In another calendar app (possibly Outlook Web Access, I forget) this can be done by clicking slightly to the left of that week’s row. OK, so maybe this was too obvious! You can click and drag a range of dates in the mini-calendar to display that range in the main view. The range can be 1-7 days or multiples of 7 days - awesome work Google!

Tips:

• Default Calendar - If you need to enter a lot of information into a particular calendar quickly, click the down-arrow next to it and choose “Display only this Calendar”. Any new items you create will be added to that calendar unless you select a different one.
• Quickly creating events - As well as the “Quick add” features above, you can drag an area in the main calendar view to create an event to fill the time slot. That feature alone takes all the donkey work out of manually entering the durations of meetings etc.
• Better locations - This is more of a Google Maps tip, but if you put your locations in with the format:
  postcode (Name of Venue) e.g. SW1A 0AA (Houses of Parliament)
  the Google Maps link will accurately point to your location rather than guessing and it’ll have the text in brackets as the title of its marker.
• Learn from others - Check out what other people are doing with Google Calendar on Flickr.