Thing 8: Google Calendar

Image by Santa Rose OLD SKOOL on Flickr courtesy of Creative Commons Licence

I have been using Google Calendar for personal reminders and this has worked really well: I've set up birthdays, contract or insurance renewals and any other reminders so that it emails me automatically a set number of days beforehand. Hopefully this means I remember to buy the present and post the card or hunt around for a better deal in time! I don't use it for appointments or events however - I still use my paper diary for those but I can feel the time coming (especially now I have an android phone) when I may make the big changeover.

At work we use Microsoft Exchange so there really isn't much scope to be using anything else. Most of us share our calendar within our team, for example, and room books are on there for teaching sessions. We're starting to use the option to send out invitations a bit more to streamline meetings or teaching. I don't like Exchange - in particular I don't like the clunky webmail and especially I don't like hitting my mailbox limit when someone sends me a whopper attachment. These are things that should be things of the past (cf. Gmail!).

We are hoping to find a better way of displaying our library opening hours and Google Calendar has been suggested for this. I have had a look around but I can't really see how we can do it without some development work using the API and that means involving more people and there's an issue of time and money. Just trying to use it straight, I couldn't get round weirdness in the display from our 24 hour opening hours or closing at 2am for example. I think when the idea of developing something has been mentioned, the answer has been we ought to use Exchange as it's already in-house but I'm not sure how that works? It's an ongoing task to try and find out.... Anyway, here are my links so far from looking at this.

I know I'm doing a very speedy catchup on my Things as I have got so behind. Thing 8 = ticked!