I’ve been researching for weeks how to get the best calendar setup using my MacBook Pro, iPhone and various goodies…I think I’ve come up with a pretty sweet approach, so I wanted to share it with everyone.
I will have to admit. Microsoft Exchange is a phenomenal platform. However, there’s so many niceties that you seem to lose with it. Thus, I’ve been trying to find some sort of measure around using Exchange for our company email, calendar, etc. and thus have come up with this approach:
The Basics
Using Google Calendar as my main calendar, then synchronizing it with my Mac’s iCal using BusySync, I’m able to get the first two pieces in line with each other. The first part is to make sure your parts are in sync with each other, meaning that the calendar that you send/accept event invitations with on Google Calendar needs to be the calendar you interact with on iCal (and you can do this with multiple calendars, but I use one primary calendar to deal with most of my free/busy time).
Getting in sync
Using BusySync, I’m able to “subscribe” to Google Calendars (even with Hosted Google Calendar, which is what I’m on). By doing this, whenever I change anything on either my iCal or Google Calendar, it updates the other (in my case, once every minute).
Once I have set everything up here, adding MobileMe, and thus the iPhone is a cinch. Just sign up for MobileMe (trust me, it’s worth the price, especially the free trial), enter your credentials and BAM your iCal stuff is up in the cloud and beamed down (by magic) to your iPhone.
Something that I didn’t quite realize was how cool all this could really be, after stumbling upon a couple other features. For instance:
By enabling this feature in Google Calendar, whenever someone sends me an event invitation, that invite request can then sync up to my iCal. If you’ve got a Mac that’s running BusySync and MobileMe, then it can be beamed down to your iPhone, all within a few minutes. In my case, I’ve got a spare Mac that just sits there and does various things (that I have for more purposes than just this). With that setup, as soon as someone invites me to something, it shows up on my iPhone within minutes…very cool.
So what other kinds of cool things can you do with this setup?
Get all my trip/flight information to my iPhone:
I use TripIt to organize all of my travel. TripIt has this really cool feature that gives you an iCal feed of all of your upcoming travel crap…from flight information to hotel checkin times, etc.
Because MobileMe doesn’t support calendar subscriptions like iCal (yeah this sucks), there IS a workaround. I go into Google Calendar and subscribe to my TripIt feed, then use the same setup that I have for everything else to sync down my “Travel” calendar. When it all comes off the cloud, I see my travel information on my iPhone, all taken care of automatically by TripIt.
See when I’m busy
Google Calendar spits out some pretty cool feeds that automatically degrade based off someone’s permission to see your calendars. You can grant email addresses with the ability to view the details of your events, even create new events for you. But in my case, I just want people to see when I’m free or busy. Each calendar spits out an HTML page that allows you to do that. So here’s an example page:
http://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/socialthing.com/embed?src=matt%40socialthing.com&ctz=America/Denver
Wrapping it up
While the methods that I use definitely aren’t out of the obvious, sometimes it just takes someone to show you the ropes to see all the cool things that you can do with the technology you’ve already got. Maybe I might do some more of this in the future…the various ways that I use stuff to be more productive, keep up with things, etc.
If you think you’ve got a better way of doing all this, please let me know …comment!
