Google Calendar… The best yet.

Been playing with the Google Calendar a bit lately and I have to say I think its one of the most useful Calendars I’ve used in a very long time. Far nicer to use than the Yahoo! calendar and puts MSN’s calendar to shame by a mile.

I think one of the best features is that I can share my calendars with other people who also use Google Calender, or I can share it as an XML or ICAL export for anyone that uses other types of calendars such as Outlook or Apple iCal and so on. :-)

I can have what appears to be an unlimited number of calendars and can subscribe to other peoples calendars, including remote ical shared calendars. That puts the Google Calendar far beyond what even Mozilla has been able to come up with for a very long time.

The most outstanding feature of this calendar is that I can put a button on this site that allows you to click it and add an event directly to your own calendar. Or I could share my event with you from my Calendar, or just share my whole public calendar with you entirely. Then again, maybe there are some things I’d rather you didn’t have access to, so I can also get quite specific about the sharing rules.

This calendar application, as far as collaboration goes, truly is the real and best example of what a Calendar app should be in the modern web-enabled world. Yet again Google has proven that you don’t need to buy the best web apps, you can make them better doing it yourself. <I looking at you Yahoo!>

There are a lot of reasons why someone might want to use this tool. Convenience being the primary one. For me, I’d most definitely prefer to use this application instead of Outlook Web Access if I were on the road. The interface is so much better. No frames, very clean, very easy to read, very easy to use. In fact, you can add an event simply by clicking on the time/day, typing in the event name and pressing enter. Its that simple. You can get more specific if you want. :-)

I was easily able to go through and start adding my friends birthdays, important anniversary dates, meetings, appointments and the like. The ease with which you can use the Calender is just fantastic. If you could write notes on a wall calendar, you can use Google Calendar. I promise you its that simple.

Another issue that really should be noticed is the invitations and the way they are more useful than ever before.

In Outlook (and bare with me here, I haven’t used it in over 4 years now) you could invite someone to participate in an event, and if they were available, they could accept, reject, tentatively accept and so on. If you were using an Exchange server, you could see their calendar schedule as well. But if you wanted to invite someone from another company that did not use Exchange, it became tedious. You’d send an invite, they’d receive it as a normal email. They’d replay with their typed answer and you’d have to manually update your calendar to show their response.

Google Calendar takes all that out of it. If you invite someone to participate in a Calendar event and they don’t have Google Calendar, the email will contain a link that they can just click on to respond to the invitation. :-)

But the features do not stop there. In fact, the frightening part is, there are so many features in this application that I’m still discovering new ones every time I use it.

The only downside to the service right now?

I think the same thing is happening to Google Calendar as happened to Google Analytics. I was fortunate enough to get Analytics set up for myself and my clients before Google were forced to only accept people by invitation only due to provisioning issues. I fear the same might be on the cards for Google Calendar. :-(

If you have a Google Account, I definitely recommend getting yourself up and running with Google Calendar while you still can. The integration with Gmail, the feature set of the application and the absolutely brilliant interface make this the best calendar application I have ever used yet. On the desktop or on the web.