Google calendar; thing 6

I've seen a number of different types of electronic calendars, ranging from web pages, which look extremely dull and cant' easily provide reminders to Microsoft Outlook, which was quite nice, but meant you were more or less forced to use Microsoft's pitiful attempt at an email client [1].

Google calendar, as long as you ignore the web side of it, however is pretty good. Ignoring the web aspect of a web application may seem contradictory, but if you combine Google Calendar with Thunderbird and Lightning you can get a quite effective calendar. Here's how it works:

1. Install and configure Thunderbird; the Computing Service has instructions on configuring Thunderbird at http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/email/muasettings/mozilla.html.
2. Download and install Lightning, an add-on for Thunderbird that allows you to create calendars on your PC, from http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/.
3. Download and install the Provider for Google Calendar from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631/.
4. Follow the instructions at http://bfish.xaedalus.net/2007/04/stay-in-sync-with-gcal-and-thunderbird/.
   

If I can find the time I'll expand on this later or somewhere else. The advantage of this is that you can set up a public calendar on Google, choose whether or not to have email reminders (I've turned them off), and then use Lightning to provide the reminders. Lightning can then have a non-public calendar for stuff you don't want everyone else to see. The only disadvantage is that you can't, as far as I can see, see other people's Google calendars in Lightning - you have to use the Web version of Google calendar to see that.

Why is this important? Part of the impetus for this was hearing that the Computing Service were talking to Google about Google apps, particularly the calendar application. Given that they were going to do this, there was bound to be some pressure from management for some or all staff to use this and I thought I might as well get some experience in how I would like to use it.

A pretty good tool on the whole.

[1] I could go on about how useless Microsoft is at Internet type stuff at great length. On the whole I'm OK with their operating systems and Office is quite good (particularly Access), but IE and Outlook/Outlook Express are pretty atrocious and have changed the way email works and not for the better.