Google Calendar Brings Time, Search Together - Sharing With Others
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All of your calendars are set to private by default, but Google offers a variety of ways for you to share your calendar information with others. You can make a calendar completely public, in which case it can be searched by anyone who has a Google calendar. Or you can share only information about when you’ll be busy and when you’ll be free, with no details. You can share you calendar with specific people – or even just parts of your calendar with specific people. As Google puts it, “For instance, you can let Aunt Jane see details about your ballet recitals but not your Lambada lessons.”
You can even share your calendar with people who aren’t Google Calendar users. As I hope you could tell from my description of adding events to the calendar, every event gets a web page associated with it. When you invite guests to an event, it becomes interactive; these guests can leave and respond to comments, sort of like Evite. You do this by clicking on the event on your calendar; when the page for the event comes up, click on “Add guests” and put their email addresses in the text box that pops up.
Another very cool way that Google allows users to share with others is through a button they’ve created. If you have a web page with events, and want to make it easy for Google Calendar users to put those events on their calendars, you can add a Google Calendar event reminder button to your site. It involves inserting some HTML that Google provides you to the web page. When a visitor to your site clicks on the button, your event details appear in the browser; they can then save these details to their Google Calendar. You need to use CGI parameters to modify the button for your event; Google’s explanation makes it look very straightforward.
As you would expect from Google, you can also put search to work in Google Calendars. You can search for particular events on your own calendars. You can use a variety of parameters, including “What,” “Who,” “Where,” “Doesn’t have” and a date range. Also, as if your own schedule wasn’t busy enough, you can search on all public calendars. There’s a box on the middle left where you can manage your calendars; it contains a text box that says “search public calendars.” This is how I found out that there were already 110 picnics scheduled on Google’s public calendars.
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