|
Google CalendarGoogle Calendar is a shining example of what a Web service should be. Price: Free
by John Brandon 
Google Calendar provides an enticing glimpse at how the company plans to take on Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop—by turning one Office app at a time into free Web applications that are easy to access and share anywhere, anytime. Enjoying all of the interactive functionality of a standalone program, this browser-based scheduler and reminder application creates private calendars and public ones for group organizing.
Here’s how it works. Users can create multiple calendars that they manage from the left column, assigning events to private or shared calendars, and using top-line tabs to switch among day, week, and monthly views. The Agenda function is especially welcome, as it lines up all upcoming events into a single list. Multiple calendars that others are sharing with you can be integrated into one view that uses color coding to distinguish the event sources. You can also choose to see all, a few, or one set of calendar entries at the same time. We experienced some loading errors when importing our Outlook calendar to Google, but eventually it worked and even replicated the alarms. In fact, this is where Google Calendar excels. You can send invitations to events just by adding someone’s e-mail address to the calendar entry itself, and you can track RSVPs to the event. Google can send alarms to a browser pop-up window, e-mail, and even to your cell phone via SMS when you register your phone number. All of these options worked well. The roughest part of Google Calendar for now is its integration with Gmail, which is supposed to detect events in message bodies and offer to assign them to the Calendar. This feature never worked for us, although you can turn any message into an event invite manually from Gmail by clicking Add Event Info. Otherwise, Google Calendar is a shining example of a Web service done right. Google Calendar Specifications Featured Site Sponsors
|
 |
|
