The current state of calendaring is weak!

I understand that the great thing about calendaring standards is that there are so many of them.  However, as a consumer of calendars, a lot of them, there has to be a better way.  We’ve been smart about consolidating our short messages with twitter, our blog posts with RSS readers, even our social lives with MySpace and then Facebook.  Can someone please intelligently explain to me why I can’t have a calendar application that allows me to consume many calendars in a single view.

Yes, I understand that the online calendar providers like Live, Google and Yahoo allow you to get their calendars consolidated.  You can also enable Outlook to do a consolidated calendar.  Unfortunately, in the end they all seem to be mutually exclusive.  All I want is:

  • A single calendar, no matter where I am, Web, PC or Mobile.
  • The ability to configure calendar feeds from places like: Exchange, Live, GMail, Yahoo, Eventbrite, Facebook, and other social groups.
  • The ability for my calendar to know the security context of the individual feed:  Can I write/read, read, or only see free/busy.

The closest I’ve come to this calendar nirvana is using my Microsoft Exchange Calendar connected to Live Calendars using the Outlook connector which gives me read/write access to my shared Live calendars directly from Outlook.  Using this method my work calendar remains on Outlook/Exchange, my personal calendar is on Live and my family calendar is shared on Live.  Using Outlook and Outlook Web Access (OWA) I finally get a decent consolidated view when I overlay the calendars.  The connectivity and latency is even a little better in Outlook 2010.  However, I still can’t get connected to my son’s baseball team calendar.  🙁

Is this really too much to ask?  Anyone seen other ways to tackle this problem?  Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Scott

(Originally Posted on scottkerfoot.com Blogengine.net blog and manually migrated to WordPress on 10/20/2017 for Historical reasons)