The Cloud Calendar... the modern way of organizing your day.

The Tech Gospel for today is about online calendar services.  I  had previously posted an entry regarding CalDav emphasizing the advantages of keeping your devices synchronized using the new open calendar standard.

This time, I'm going to emphasize the advantages of sharing your calendar with others.  If you're like me, you're the type of person who likes keeping your personal schedule out of your office/work calendar... but this introduces the issue of having to check different calendars for overlap and schedule conflicts.  Enter calendar sharing.

Most online calendar services allow the creation of multiple calendars within your account.

Online sharing allows me to have a different calendar for different activities or projects.  Sharing each calendar with the appropriate people to either view or edit depending on the permissions I set.  What I do, is share my work calendar with my personal account via CalDav.  This would allow me to see and edit my work sked from my personal calendar.  I can then create a calendar in my personal account labeled [Vacation] then share that particular calendar with my work calendar.  This allows anyone who adds me to a meeting to automatically see that I'm not available at a particular date or time.

This is highly beneficial in almost any type of scenario, from managing meeting schedules for work, dinner with friends, or just keeping a schedule of personal tasks.

The advantage of sharing calendars is that I don't have to check a separate calendar for work, home, friends, etc...  Even if they are created on other domains or by other people.  All events from different sources can be pooled into my online service, then synced with all my devices, automatically...wirelessly. 

**Since shared calendars can be edited by the person(s) you share it with, all your appointments can be made, scheduled, and rescheduled by your assistant, or other parties involved in an event, or project.  This allows everyone involved in an event to have access to the updated schedules all the time since alerts can be made to inform everyone of any changes made.**