Tech Tools: Managing and Sharing Your Calendar
Organizing your Time: The Problem
I was working with a client recently who was having some problems synchronizing schedules internally. My client is a small consulting company with about ten employees who evaluate EPA and OSHA compliance for their clients.
Employees of this company regularly travel to visit with clients nationwide, and each employee tracked his or her own travel schedule individually using Outlook’s calendar. As a result, any time the company needed to schedule something that required the attendence of all employees, they had to ask each employee for a list of dates that would work.
Employees began to address this problem by exporting a full month from their Outlook calendars and sharing them internally, but this approach has a number of drawbacks:
- It requires too much manual effort. In this day and age, we should be able to automate just about anything.
- There was no regular schedule to it. Some people may have done it weekly while others did it once a month, and obviously the exported copies did not update as schedules inevitably changed.
- The calendars were all still separate. In order to schedule a meeting, management had to look at each schedule individually in order to see what dates were available.
My client wanted a cheap (or free) solution that would allow employees to see at a glance where all of their co-workers would be at any given time. For a company that operates so remotely, this would hopefully give everyone a better view of the big picture. It had to be reliable and easy to use, and accessible on the web from any computer, but also secure and not publicly visible.
The Solution: 30Boxes
30Boxes is an awesome, free, web-based calendar service. I played with it a few years back when I built a program that automatically scoured upcoming events in my area, picked out those I might enjoy, and added them to my calendar, complete with driving directions and related images. It seemed like an ideal solution for my client.
Click to see full screen
To use 30Boxes, each employee has a free account on the site, and then shares his calendar with the other employees. You can then assign a different color to each person, so it’s easy to see who is available each day (as shown above). It’s extremely easy to use too:
To create a new appointment, you can simply type “Doctor Appt tomorrow 10am [123 main st., chicago IL].” This will create an appointment for the following day at the appropriate time and even link to a map of this location.
Here’s a quick rundown of some of the particularly cool features:
- Email or SMS reminders
- Prioritize or privatize specific events
- Share events by specific tags
- Printable calendar by the day, week or month
- Automatic directions from home or work to an event by supplying address
- Share calendar by RSS feed
- Personal “Webtop” with access to calendar, to-do list, favorite places, weather, buddy updates from various social networks, and other features
Not bad for a free service…
Pulling it all Together: Synchronization
Since most of my clients already use Outlook for their calendars, it was important to try to make this transition as seamless as possible. Old habits die hard, and people aren’t likely to change overnight. That’s where SyncMyCal comes in. This little application allows users to synchronize Outlook with 30Boxes at the push of a button, or even automatically with no input required. Considering the hassle it will eliminate by automating the synchronization process, it’ll be well worth the $25 license fee.
For a full run-down of the features in 30Boxes, check out this 9 minute video review:
Other Calendar Options
30Boxes is by no means the only solution to this problem. Microsoft offers something similar through their recently developed Office Online. They allow Office users to publish calendars, subscribe to others, and do many of the things discussed above. However, several of my experiences with projects involving Microsoft products have caused serious headaches in the past.
Google Calendar is another popular option. MacWorld provides a decent review of its features. There are applications that allow you to synchronize Google Calendar with Outlook as well. I’m sure this would have worked just as well as 30Boxes, and is especially convinient for anyone who uses iGoogle or GMail.
BackPack, part of the 37Signals suite, is a great tool for organizing groups. It has all the same features mentioned above, along with a whole heap of other tools. More on BackPack and a few other apps over at Mitch’s Meanderings.
What do you use to manage your schedule? Are there other online tools out there that are worth a look?
we use HyperOffice at our office. individuals and groups can easily set up online calendars which can be accessed from any PC, Mac or mobile device. schedules can easily be matched, weve never had clashing events discovered at the last moment. the best part is, each individual can synch it with their Outlook calendar. you get the familiarity and ease of Outlook calendars and the power of being in a collaborative environment.
July 3rd, 2008 at 3:08 pm