So I have been using the Office 2007 beta for a day. I was using the Outlook 2007 client and was admiring the new calendar view. Then I noticed that it said, ‘Browse Calendars Online’. Being a fan of the internet based calendar I decided to check it out. It appears that you will be able to easily publish your calendar so that others can see it. They allow you to upload your calendar to office online. At first I was excited at the prospect. Even more so when I realized that they decided to go with an industry standard!!! That’s right the same as Apple and Google. My first thought was I could use Outlook to manage my calendar. Unfortunately I was only partly right.
With a little effort I realized that any link to a valid iCal file could be prefixed with a webcal:// for outlook to recognize it as a valid ‘web calendar’. So I logged into my Google calendar account and got my private iCal address. I then put the url in ie and viola Outlook 2007 picked it up and registered it as a web calendar. Awesome!!!! So next naturally I tried to add an item to the calendar and it barked saying it was read-only. BUMMER!!!!! So what to do next?
Go back to the ‘Remote Calendars’ site and see what kind of progress they have made there. Remote calendars is an add-in for Outlook 2003 that allows you to at a minimum read iCals from the web and to also sync them back. A couple months back I tried this but it was a bit buggy and one of my add-ins did not like it much so I had to uninstall. Any how, back to the site. I went there and realized they just made an update to the code. I downloaded it but it would not install without Office 2003 PIA’s and PIA’s wont’ install when 2007 is installed. And sorry to say it I am just not hard core enough to hack it to get it to work.
So I downloaded the code just to see how they were publishing. It turns out it is a separate URL that you can use for publishing. So I changed my calendar to use that URL. It downloaded the calendar but still it was read only. Now I am bumming because unless Google makes a plug-in or someone else finds a way to get this add-in to work, I will not be able to do a round trip and I will be forced to do one of two things.
Update always in the web browser then sync back to outlook (kind of a pain).
Be forced to use Microsoft’s Office Online to publish my calendars and share my calendars from there.
The thought of doing A automatically means that I will not be able to use this solution for my wife since it would be too much work for her. And giving up my loyalty to Google may be tough. In the end, I like Google’s tools (maps, search mail and calendar) better than I like Microsoft’s. So where does that leave me??? Begging of course!
<shameless begging> Dear Google Calendar Gods,
Please give me a plug-in that will work with Outlook that would allow me to add events to my ‘read-only’ calendar in Outlook 2007 and then publish them back to you. If you want to let the wind out of MS’ sails do this one thing for me .</shameless begging>
At any rate the fact I can do this even in read only mode means I can at least have a read only view of my wife’s schedule and that in itself is cool enough for me right now!!