Migrating wife to an online "Family Calendar"

IVB

IVB

Senior Member
One of the last holdouts in the home automation realm is our "family calendar". For some ungodly reason, the wife prefers a big-ass desk calendar that we have to maintain, and god forbid both of us schedule something without writing it down - we end up with TONS of conflicting RSVP's or none at all. This generates other problems too, namely we don't know what is scheduled until we go home/etc.

Have any of you migrated to a fully online family calendar? Doesn't have to be integrated with CQC, hell i'd be happy with a generic MSN account/google calendar. Any lessons learned?
 
we tried out google calendar for a while, but no matter how much i prodded, she wouldn't update it, so it quickly fell by the wayside.

the calendaring function i've enjoyed the most is on the iPhone. I can run mobileMe on my PC and it syncs my Outlook calendar with my iPhone calendar auto-magically. however, i don't think there is support for multiple-person calendars using that (i haven't checked), and I'm pretty sure you don't use an iPhone (with your .NET viewer and all).

if she has a smartphone like you (HTC or whatever), sure Google mobile allows her to carry a Google calendar around with her?
 
We use Google Calendar. I can sync it to my iPhone using www.nuevasync.com/ and my wife uses the browser on her Blackberry. You can also use a normal browser, and with some free 3rd party tools you can sync it with Outlook and Sunbird.

I have been very please and it has made it where we can both see all the calendar events.

We also use Toodledo for our task lists.

Eric
 
We've been using google calendar in our family for a little over a year now and through fits and starts, ebbs and flows / whatever you want to call it, we seem to be gaining momentum.

Now... I am the guy with the computer science degree. I am the one who fools around with this stuff. So getting her on board has been a challenge...

But here are the benefits to google calendar as I see it, in our own usage...

- Online, accessible from anywhere you can get a browser (Mobile, PC, etc.)
- You can have multiple calendars (Like we have one for each child, one for church stuff, one for household maintenance, one for each of us, and one for my homeowners association)
- Calendars can be shared with others
- Individual events have "invite" capability.
- If you have an address for where your "event" is, it integrates into google maps.
- the ability to have email reminders of events
- the ability to have SMS reminders of events (This one is huge for us now that we have the Sprint everything data plan with unlimited texting)

I also installed a cool little firefox add-in that makes your calendar just pop-up in an ajax window from a little icon down in the status bar ("GCal Pop-up" I think it is called), so I don't have to open a tab just for the calendar.

Lastly, both my wife and I are Palm users. I have the 755p and she the Centro. In june I will be upgrading to the Pre (assumign it is out) and its "synergy" functionality works well with the "cloud". I am anticipating once my wife sees how cool the calendaring is with google calendar integrated into "synergy" she be in it full swing.

One suggestion, make calendar names understandable... "Smith Family Church Activities" or "Smith Family Household Maintenance"

(The household maintenance is cool, since I get an email/sms reminder to change smoke detector batteries twice a year, and to change the furnace filter each month, and to uncover/cover the A/C condenser unit in the spring and fall... My life is very busy and I forget the routine stuff... this has been tremendously helpful. to me anyway.)

Overall I'd give it a "B+"... and once my Pre gets here that will nudge to an "A" I imagine.
 
Also, I use "remember the milk" for to-do lists, which can integrate as a "calendar" into google calendar.

Additionally, there are some cool firefox add-ins that spice ti up (like "Better GCal" and such).
 
we've used gcal for the past few years. my wife usually updates her calendar on her winmo phone and occasionally syncs to gcal w/ oggsync - not often enough though. the google data api makes it easy to extract events from the calendars so i can put them on our main intranet page & have them announced via tts in the morning. i also wrote an xPL app that checks the calendars every 15 minutes and sends OSD reminders before appointments occur and also to our IM clients.
 
I also use google calendar (wow google really has all our personal information dont they...) which I sync to both our PPC's
 
Here is another vote for google calander....We use it and have it pushed (as well as email) to our windows mobile phones. Works great.

And yes, I agree, Google has way to much of our information. One day google will be our Skynet I am afraid....I guess we will have to welcome our Google Robot Overlords (beta).
 
Mobile access certainly sounds awesome, but my current mobile calendar synchs to my work laptop so it's got all that crap on there. Hmmm - the wife's doesn't, though (she's got a samsung blackjack). I could manually log into to calendar.google, no issues there. Hmmm. And, the wife has wanted an iPhone...
 
Holy crap, the wife just emailed me about her having to change the date of her haircut from some day i won't remember to another day i won't remember. i replied with this:

Mrs. IVB said:
FYI, I moved my haircut to Sunday, May 3 at 2pm, that's all she had...
Click to expand...

IVB said:
eh, ok, but i have no idea what's going on that day. This is killing me - i'm going to setup a google calendar for our official "family" calendar, so it's easier to tell what's what. We can setup your phone to synch to it (mine is already sync'ed to work, so i can't do that).
Click to expand...

Mrs. IVB said:
ok
Click to expand...

Now the real question is - by "ok" does she mean "sure, that's a great idea"? Or is it like when we swore we wouldn't get each other xmas gifts, only to have a gift show up under the tree addressed to me on 12/22...
 
IVB said:
eh, ok, but i have no idea what's going on that day. This is killing me - i'm going to setup a google calendar for our official "family" calendar, so it's easier to tell what's what. We can setup your phone to synch to it (mine is already sync'ed to work, so i can't do that).
Click to expand...

the sync software I use http://oggsync.com/ (I use the freeware version because Im cheap :) ) I beleive the "PRO" version (yearly fee) can sync specific data if it is entered that way....
well it looks like they have a workaround for it.....

Code: 
Q) Can I set up OggSync Pro so that my Outlook business appointments do *not* get synced with any google calendar?

A) To keep your non-category Outlook Events from appearing in Google calendars, do the following: create a new google calendar (which will remain blank, you can call it “outlook†for example), choose that calendar as your default calendar (â€Set default calendarâ€) and make sure that calendar is NOT selected to be synced.



What other sync software is everyone using for google cals?
 
Damage beat me to it...

They have a native client, plus an enhanced view of GCal in Safari on the iPhone / iTouch...

It's good stuff...

(But I am waiting for the Palm Pre. :) )
 
MainLobby supports 2 way integration with Outlook. The family calendar can be maintained from the native Outlook app or from the MainLobby touchscreen.
 
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