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Just about all your data is finding its way onto the web. You can organize and share your bookmarks, upload and edit photos and share and edit documents so why not do the same with your calendar?
There are dozens of options in the world of online calendars, but while some of the smaller players offer some nice niche features, the big players offer stability and there's little danger of the services disappearing one day.
Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all offer web-based calendar systems, each with their distinct advantages and disadvantages. While Yahoo and Microsoft have capable calendaring apps, we found Google Calendar offered a cleaner, simpler interface and it's setup and sharing options were more robust and simpler to use.
The big downside to Google Google calendar is that it does not offer support for Microsoft Outlook calendars.
There are some third party offerings like "SyncMyCal"<http://www.syncmycal.com/> ($25 per seat) that can fill this void in "Google Calendar"<http://www.google.com/calendar/>, but they are unofficial and could stop working, should Google decide to alter its calendar service. Google has said in the past that it plans to add Outlook support, but it has never given a timeline.
If you need Outlook support you're better off with "Yahoo Calendar"<http://calendar.yahoo.com/?>, however, for the rest of us, Google's offering is slicker and has better sharing features.
#Basic cal setup
To get started in Google Calendar login to your Google Account or just login to GMail and click "Calendar," which will land you in the main calendar page. Head to "Settings" and then click "Calendars," followed by "Create New Calendar."
Give your Calendar a name, description so other will know what it is when you share it. You can also set a location and time zone.
#Sharing and Collaboration
Below these basic setup options you'll see some preferences for sharing. The "Share with everyone" option refers to who can see your calendar and its events. There are three settings, "everyone," which makes the URL public, "share only free/ busy information" which lets other see when you're occupied, but doesn't say what you're doing, and "do not share," which keeps your calendar entirely private.
Once you decide how much you want the world at large to know its time to set up your Calendar for Google's specialty: collaboration. If you need to track and coordinate with a team of employees or just a group of friends you can add their e-mail addresses and control what sort of access they have to your calendar.
If you forget someone, no need to panic, just head to settings >> calendars and click on the calendar to edit.
Once you've added a user and given them permission to change events, that person can edit the shared calendar and you'll both see the changes.
#Do More
Google Calendar can send alerts via e-mail and SMS messages to keep you abreast of your appointments, but there are number of other ways to track your calendars.
For your mobile needs there's calendar.google.com which provides a slimmed down interface for mobile phones and even auto-detects the iPhone and delivers a version designed for the touch screen.
You can subscribe to your Google Calendar in any desktop application that supports the variety of formats Google Calendar offers. Just head to the "Calendars" section and copy and paste the URL in to your favorite Desktop app.
Keep in mind however, that most desktop calendar apps won't offer round trip syncs with Google Calendar. Mac users can invest in "Spanning Sync"<http://www.spanningsync.com/> ($25/year or $65 for life) which enables Apple iCal to read and write to Google Calendars. There's also a free project, "Provider"<http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/06/mozilla-sunbird.html>, that enables the Mozilla's Sunbird Calendar to read and write to Google Calendar.
Firefox users can check out "Google Calendar Notifier"<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2528>, which provides update and schedule-at-a-glance views in the Firefox status bar.
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