I’ve chosen the Google Calendar – the calendar or diary being the first thing that many people check when planning their working day. Google’s web based calendar integrates with Google’s Mail and Map services, offering a tidy calendar solution for a mobile worker or team of mobile workers needing to access their diary from outside the office.

Getting started:
To get started with Google Calendar you’ll need a Google email address – you can get one by signing up at Google Mail or emailing me for a Google Mail invite.

Ease of use:
The Google Calendar is remarkably easy to use – adding new events requires just a click on the calendar. Editing an event on the calendar brings up a box reassuringly familiar to anyone who has used computer based calendar systems – there are options for inviting guests, setting the event as public or private, adding descriptions, and so on.

This kind of usability is key to attracting and keeping users who value time and simplicity above all else – the chances are that if you can’t figure out how to use a web service within 5 minutes, then you’ll not bother at all. Many writers have identified technological factors as barrier to the voluntary/non-profit sector adopting new technology – which we’ll cover in later posts.

Importing calendars:
Importing events from Outlook is also easy – it took me less than 2 minutes to export the Outlook calendar file and import in to Google Calendar. Remember that Google’s calendar doesn’t synchronise with Outlook – any changes you make in Outlook will have to be exported and re-imported to Google calendar.

Create and share calendars:
The Google calendar also makes it easy to create new calendars – and share them. This is particularly useful if you want to create a separate calendar for different teams or different team members. You can share your calendars with contacts in your Google Mail contacts.

There are two main ways of sharing Google calendar.  The first and safest is to share your Google calendar by adding the email addresses of office colleagues/collaborators needing to see your availability for meetings, etc.  You can also set the level of access they have to the Google calendar.  the second method is to give colleagues a private URL to your Google calendar in either XML, iCal or HTML format. The forthcoming Microsoft Office 2007 is set to offer the ability to import or export calendar files in the iCal standard.
You may also want to make the calendar ‘public’ – this is useful if you want the public to see events, workshops or training you’re hosting. Different calendars can also be colour-coded.

Integration:
Calendar events are also integrated with Google Mail – a nice feature if you want to invite people in your Google address book to a meeting. Calendar events also integrate with Google Maps – making events easy to locate. I’d like to see calendar integration with Google Mobile – your diary available on your mobile phone, just like the Blackberry toting dudes, at a fraction of the cost.

Overall:
Google calendar has all the basic diary functions that mobile workers or a small community group might need. I’m not suggesting that it’s a replacement for web access to Microsoft Exchange Server. But Google calendar is free, easy to use and could form part of a web-based suite of tools for those needing to access their diary, documents and mail from anywhere with an internet connection.

There are plenty of other web calendars specialising in group collaboration – like Planzo and HipCal, but none currently offers Google’s integration with other web services.

As always, don’t take my word for it – try these tools as well and let me know what you think about using them as part of a virtual office.