Google Calendar Released

Google Calendar is out now, and I've officially declared it's superiority over Microsoft Outlook. But here's a review and comparison anyways.

As many of you probably know, I work in the callcenter for an on site computer repair company called TechNoggins. My job is to take calls from the customers, diagnose the problem, and schedule an engineer to go to their location and fix the problem. We cover eleven markets across three states: Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. To do this, we use Microsoft Outlook's Calendar Functionality. We create a user on our Exchange Server for each market, and then place the the available engineers up top (as all-day appointments). As calls come in, we place the customer information on the appropriate calendar, and dispatch the Engineer accordingly.

When Google Calendar was released Thursday (I think it was Thursday. Right, guys?), I was ecstatic. Not only had I written this down on my Sony Clié and submitted it to Google as a suggestion quite some time ago, but it also had met my expectations and contained all of my needed functionality and ideas. I immediately opened up a calendar, started putting information on it, messing around with the buttons... and I was quite impressed.

The first thing that caught my attention was the New Event form. Clearly labelled with things like "What", "Where", and "When", I found it a wonderful breath of fresh air from Outlook's appointment form, labelled with "Subject"
(gosh, sounds so 90's-ish), "Location", and simply "Start time" and "End time". There's also a label thing there, and a reminder thing, and a busy thing. In Outlook, you can also add Contacts, Categories, and make the appointment "Private". Of course, we all know how secure Windows' passwords are. Looking at Google's form, you can see that everything is covered, save for Category: which I assume is made up for by the ability to create multiple calenders for your own use.

But there's more. Google's form ALSO allows you to add a guest, and provide an invitation, all on the same page. Outlook's equivalent is hidden deep within some right click menu...

When an invitation is sent to a guest, they get a nice little email asking them if they're going to attend or not... or they can even put a "maybe"! When they decide what they're doing, their information shows up on my calendar, and I know whether or not they're coming. It also seems fully scalable - I could most likely add 500 "guests" and get similiar results.

(insert more here... soon. Maybe later.)

Best of all, it's web based. It's all Web 2.0 (meaning a lot of AJAX), so there's no connecting to the Exchange Server crap, there's no install of Office... blah blah. Screw Outlook Web, too... yeah.

Add my my calendar, my gmail is eric.martindale@gmail.com