Oracle of ONE1

This is a simple overview of taking advantage of calendar sharing. Calendar sharing is available from many services but I will limit discussion here to the big 3. Part II of this article covers the details of subscribing to a calendar in Outlook.

Google Way

updated 5/7/2009

Use Google Calendar to easily share event and meeting calendars with a group. Once created, friends can view or subscribe to the calendar. There are 3 methods to accomplish this.

One, you can simply link to the calendar with a button. As an example, view the shared calendar for Milwaukee Achiever Literacy Services – Board meeting and event calendar.

Two, invite your friends to subscribe to the calendar using a iCal compliant calendar client. To subscribe to the MA board calendar use this URL. The subscribed calendar will update automatically whenever you add a new item. This is a large advantage over Live.

Three, embed your Google calendar into a web site using iframes. As an example, see the MA Board calendar embedded into this page.

Windows Live Way (hotmail)

Windows Live provides many of the same capabilities as Google. In fact, it allows direct access via a URL to a shared calendar to visitors who are not logged in. This is an advantage over Google.

Allow friends to view your calendar directly using a URL generated from the Windows Live sharing page. For the MA example you may click on this URL.

While it is not possible to subscribe to a calendar, it is certainly possible to import a calendar into an iCal compatible client. For MA try this URL.

Yahoo Way

Yahoo does not provide the ability to create multiple calendars. It does allow you to share calendar items though. I considered this approach not sufficient for my purposes.