The Multiple Calendars Issue (amongst others) – and the answer

I have always had loads of problems with multiple calendars and having to cross reference across things. It’s one of the reasons that the only definitive calendar I run is the one on bits of paper. The technology has just not helped, and it’s been like that forever.

Along comes Ray Ozzie who describes the problem:

For years, as many of you, my work life has involved significant travel.  As significant bi-coastal coordination has now entered into the mix, things have gotten even more complicated for me, for my wife, for my assistant and hers.  In order to stay on the same page, each of us has the need for (limited) visibility into aspects of each others’ calendars and schedules.  Each of us has a mix of private, shared, and public events and meetings that we’re tracking.

Some of these we edit privately and publish to others.  (This itself has posed significant challenges – particularly sharing partial information from confidential calendars.)  The most challenging calendars we deal with are those that are “shared”, such as the family calendar my wife and I jointly maintain, or the calendars we share with outside groups – such as the meeting calendars of volunteer organizations.

It’s tough because we use a mix of different email/calendaring systems – corporate as well as non-corporate, web-based as well as client-based.  And to each of us it makes sense to want to edit the calendar in our own PIM application of choice where we do all our calendaring and scheduling work – not within calendaring systems on other various websites.

And then describes an answer to the problem:

And so we created an RSS extension that we refer to as Simple Sharing Extensions or SSE.  In just a few weeks time, several Microsoft product groups and my own ‘concept development group’ built prototypes and demos, and found that it works and interoperates quite nicely.

Just like that. Yes please. Let’s hope that this really takes off and that I can have a great synchronisation experience for all of those things that I have wanted synchronised forever; calendars, contacts, reading lists.

The one I didn’t see in Ray’s list was the ‘wish list’, why should I need to maintain a different wish list at each online store I visit. I should have one wish list and allow each store to show the ones that they stock.

Thanks Ray. I hope the rest of your blogs have this same level of impact.