Google Calendar Launches

In the coming days, every tech pundit to amateur fanboy will be heralding tonight’s Google Calendar launch as the second coming of Chr-st. I’m skeptical. Google’s latest foray into web applications can do calendar sharing amongst a group of people, event invitations and RSVP management (think evite), mobile device event reminders, and integration with its webmail but then again so does Yahoo! Calendar. However, Yahoo! Calendar goes a step further by allowing users to locally sync with Outlook, Outlook Express, Palm OS handhelds, Pocket PC handhelds, and more. Google doesn’t.

For people in my field, it is a necessity to have access to our schedules throughout the day on our PDA/smartphones. To facilitate this, our appointments and meetings are all sent to Microsoft Outlook via Exchange which then syncs with our handheld devices. Then again, if a field requires this sort of calendaring, then solutions have already been in place long before Google Calendar ever came to be. Therefore it remains to be seen how important this feature is with the target audience of online calendars. In the mean time, users can manually export calendars from Outlook in CSV format and then import into Google Calendar. I tested this feature and it worked fine although it was a rather cumbersome process that I would abhor repeating regularly. This product is not for a serious PIM user so I’m going to reserve judgement for now until I get honest feedback from the casual webmail using masses. Regardless, we should all be prepared for lots of uninformed cheerleading over the next few days.

Popularity: 2% [?]

April 12, 2006 | Filed Under Tech/Gadgets 

Comments

Comments are closed.