outlook, google calendar, & remote calendars

Sometimes I think keeping a paper-based calendar/diary would be a whole lot easier. Or maybe just using a Mac, that actually has a nice looking calendar program.

I use Outlook 2003 on my Win XP box at the office as my primary calendar. We don't use Exchange in the office though -- just good old IMAP-based email and individual calendaring. And I happen to use Thunderbird as my mail client. So I rely on 2 packages to manage my calendar and email. This gets a bit annoying sometimes for meeting requests, which I see in Thunderbird but then possibly forget to slurp into my Outlook calendar by viewing them in my Outlook inbox.

Nonetheless, Outlook is a calendar tool that I've come to rely upon and that 5 day view plus some todos and a quick 3 month at a glance feature is about all I really need.

Outside of work, I keep busy with lots of other events. Where do I keep those calendar details? Well, in Outlook. But not just at work, but also at home. At home, I'm running Outlook as well on my home workstation. And just to keep my really organized, it's nice to have a copy of my calendar on my Nokia 7210 phone. I use Nokia's nifty PC Suite / Synchronize software and a USB cable to download my Outlook work calendar (and upload every now and again). But I've only got one cable, it lives at work, and it's not ideal for docking and syncing so that I can get the home-based calendar up to date.

Boy, if I only had a calendar server that worked like an imap-based mail server... (but not have to install Exchange to get it).

I also don't have any kind of group calendar authoring / collaborating environment and any way of syncing that back to Outlook, either at work or at home.

Until now.

Google Calendar is out and I created a couple of calendars for myself and my two cycling clubs. Invite other users to be able to add events through the Google Calendar interface, and voila, you've got yourself a group calendar solution. The UI is pretty slick, full of Googles AJAX-y goodness, in large part thanks to Mr. Bowman no doubt.

I noticed when playing around with it that Google Calendar has iCal and XML feed capabilities. "Wouldn't it be nice if I could subscribe to a remote calendar in Outlook 2003?" I thought...

Some quick googling and voila, I found the open source .NET add-on to Outlook, Remote Calendars. Now it took me a good hour or so to get it installed and lots of people have problems with their setup (it is open source). I had to ultimately install the VSTO download from Microsoft. Once that had happened, along with the Microsoft Primary Interop Assemblies PIA install that was also required, I managed to get it working. These are installs to get Outlook 2003 to allow for add-ons to be installed and work nicely. I've also got a Google add-on and a Microsoft CRM add-on that uses the same COM plugin architecture.

Now I can subscribe to my published iCal feeds from Google and they show up, perfectly in Outlook. I can't go upstream (Outlook to Google) but that's less of a concern, as I'm just trying to get a group-based calendar that we can all edit and subscribe to as step 1 in the process.

One issue: the control of the publishing of the calendar feed in Google Calendar is very coarse: all people can see it, no-one can see it, or only show free/busy info.

There's no user authentication required to get at it either. Which would be nice. Or even a per-calendar password that you could share with your trusted group of friends that would control the subscription to your calendar. But right now, it's kind of an all-or-nothing affair.

The author of Remote Calendars pointed this out as well and has sent an email to the Google team. We'll see what comes of that.

Of course, having just watched Jensen Harris give his talk on the upcoming Office 2007 at the VanUE on Thursday night, I'm hoping that this is all very short-term. If Outlook 2007 gets the same kind of refresh that Microsoft gave Word and Excel and Powerpoint, then I'm going to guess a lot of this type of functionality will be in there by default.

But for now, if you're looking for some quick and dirty Outlook and Google Calendar integration (or any Outlook iCal integration for that matter), then Remote Calendars is a useful download.