Ok, I have to start off by saying I am not a Microsoft flunky. I have been exploring Office 2007 for our campus and since I rely heavily upon email to rule my life (yes, pitiful I know) I have started to dive into the new features of Outlook 2007. I posted on the RSS Feed feature and I just found a really cool calendaring feature that I had not seen in the 2003 version.

I had started to move to a web-based calendar as part of my digital nomad explorations. Doug Belshaw had posted a piece on his endeavors with G-Cal. I even managed to add a Google Calendar to my wiki. However one of the biggest drawbacks was my inability to sync nicely with my Outlook calendar. This doesn’t fully address the sync issue as it is read only but it is getting close. It turns out that Outlook now explicity supports subscription based calendaring using the iCal format. Under Tools -> Account Settings, click the Internet Calendars tab.

So I added one of my Google Calendars using the Private URL feature offered by Google. Once I did that and enabled the view by checking the appropriate box I had two calendars in my window: one native to Outlook and the other my new subscription. Since I didn’t use the local calendar, I simply turned it’s view off and my G-Cal is now my primary calendar in my local client. I still have to make changes online but I was doing that anyway.

Now if there was a way to allow for bi-directional communication between Outlook and web-based calendars such as Google Calendar I would be downright giddy!

technorati tags:microsoft, outlook, 2007, msoutlook2007, internet, calendar, google_calendar, google

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