Google gives us one more reason to move away from office and onto the "cloud" with this extremely useful calendar application. In fact, this free application has many advantages to it's stalwart calendar competitors.

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As an avid Outlook user I liked the ability to "stay organized" by creating recurrences of important events, quickly jumping to dates and having those pleasant reminders go off every 5 minutes when an event occurred. Well, I do not like the reminder box, but that's a different story. Outlook offered a digital alternative to my written daily planner, and for that I was excited. Unfortunately, as is often the case, my desire to go digital outweighed the true benefits of using Outlook. It ended up becoming another tool I used rather than a tool that replaced many other outmoded tools.

Now, Google in their attempt to take us online and show us more ads created Google Calendar (still in beta after almost 3 years). While there are some downfalls, Google Calendar takes us another step forward in making it easy to be a true mobile professional, collaborate appointments with coworkers and colleagues thus making us more productive business owners.

Become a Mobile Professional

Outlook and other desktop clients like it fail because as we travel and make appointments there is no way to update on the fly. While Blackberry's can do this now (through RIM licenses) and Windows Mobile devices can update remotely as well (through Exchange) the reality is that you are locked to the old desktop paradigm with Outlook. For small business owners Google Calendar offers these solutions:

• Update and retrieve your events through any web enabled browser -http://calendar.google.com
• Use your web enabled phone to retrieve events directly from their mobile site -m.google.com/calendar
• From your mobile phone, use SMS to text information. Text to: 48368 (GVENT)
  • Text "next" to get a notification regarding your next scheduled event.
  • Text "day" to get a notification containing all of your scheduled events for the present day.
  • Text "nday" to get a notification containing all of your events for the following day.
  • Text a date (e.g., June 8 or June 8 2009 or 6-8-09...) to get a notification containing all of your events for that day.
  • To create an event via SMS, simply send a text message containing your event's details.

Within the Calendar application you can either create an event or use the "Quick Add" feature (my preference) which allows you to very quickly create an event using a sentence like structure.

Finally, when setting a calendar event through the browser, you can configure a number of ways to notify you of the event's occurrence. Choose from a pop-up (like trusty Outlook), email (great for those of us with Blackberry's) or SMS. Nothing is better than forgetting that appointment and having the reminder come up in 3 different ways in synchronization. You will not forget your appointments that way!

Collaborate Appointments with Coworkers and Colleagues

I really liked the "free/busy" service from Microsoft. It allowed you to see if your colleagues or collaborators will available when you scheduled a meeting. This service went away...actually became a pay service. There were limitations to it as well like everyone had to be a subscriber, etc.

Google Calendar changes that. Unfortunately, the invitees need to be Google Calendar users. If they are not, they will be invited to join, free of charge, of course. However, it is easy to invite others using their email account. You can setup the invite to give them the ability to "modify event", "invite others" and/or "see guest list". All of these options make this feature even more dynamic.

Last of all, Google Calendar enables you to search for other calendars. Suppose Tom down the hall wants everyone to know when the weekly meetings are, he can create a recurring event in Google Calendar, publish it publicly and then you can find it by searching through Google's Calendar Search. Options like "What", "Who","Where", and "Date From" allow you to quickly find the one you want. Additionally, you can find out about local events, phases of the moon, when your favorite sports team is playing, etc. through the many publicly offered calenders throughout the service. This is a great tool to use if you run a networking group, schedule parties, or have weekly events that you want others to come to. You can tell an interested person, "Just check out Google Calendar and search for 'Fun Filled Leads Group' in 'Orlando, Florida'" and they will be able to see your events.

On the Downside

The way that calendars are shared is a little bit transparent. I would like the ability to grab events created by others and make them my own, but that is not an option. Each of the public calendars "sits" next to yours so that you can view them all side by side. Furthermore many of the public calendars out there overlap, so you might pick two that have about 2/3 of their events the same...but that final 1/3 might be different...and irresistible. This part kills me since it is not possible to eliminate the redundancy.

More Productive Business Owner

This part is the kicker and the reason why I have adopted Google Calendar. It's called Google Calendar Sync and it enables your Outlook to talk to Google Calendar. Everything that was "trapped" on your Outlook can be freed and sent to the web. Now they are able to talk and communicate in harmony. If you are in a large corporate environment chances are that the IT department has locked down installation of new programs, and if you are an iCal user, you still have to export and import.

I am a Blackberry user, and I have the Google Sync application for it (here's the link for other phones). With the latest upgrade comes batch calendar syncing from the phone to the Google Calendar service. With both of these pieces of software running, a calendar event created on my cell phone updates to my office Outlook in a matter of minutes. Digital Xanadu is realized.

This whole microcosm goes back to Google's open source model and along with this is integration with apps such as Remember the Milk, Jott, GMail and others.

Google Calendar is a worthwhile calendar program that can augment your current organizational needs. Despite the drawbacks I have yet to find an alternative nearly as complete and user friendly.