New Calendaring Clients
Two years ago the market for calendaring clients was fairly static. If you were in the enterprise, it was either Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes, and perhaps one or two others. Now there is no telling what you may be using, or what you may prefer. "When we set out to architect the TimeBridge service in 2005, it was very Outlook-centric," admits Nelken. "But when we released our first beta in November 2006, we were startled to realize how quickly Microsoft is losing its monopolistic grip on email and calendaring. The number of beta users who wanted deep Google Calendar integration amazed us, as did the number who requested support for Apple's iCal calendar."
Google Calendar is reflective of the new world of calendaring. Released in April 2006, it has quickly become the reference point for Web-based calendaring. It has attracted a large following, and has become the calendaring client of choice for vendors touting their integrated wares. And just as Microsoft relies on developers to build add-ons to bulk out core capabilities in its platform offerings and thus to increase the value to end-users, the release of Google's calendar API has seen a host of third-party developers offering commercial services for the platform. Users with a PC and Outlook in the office and a Mac with iCal at home can use synchronization software and Google Calendar to keep the two coordinated. SyncMyCal or gSyncit, for example, performs bidirectional synchronization between Outlook and Google Calendar, and SpanningSync does the same between Google Calendar and iCal. Other add-on software includes migration utilities (for migrating desktop calendar data into Google Calendar, e.g., CompanionLink Software's gMigrate), mobile and wireless device synchronization software (e.g., CompanionLink for Google Calendar, or SnoopSoft's WebCalendar), online task list integration (e.g., Remember TheMilk), new desktop clients for offline access to Google Calendar (e.g., Thunderbird 2.0, CalGoo and Gcal, depending on your platform).
Calimanjaro is a new calendaring client for the Windows platform, released in October 2006. Its main claim to fame is the large number of views of calendaring data it supports out-of-the-box-adding a 6-month view, a 12-month view, a 24-month view, among 35 or so others to the default of day, work week, week and month found in Outlook or Notes. It supports calendar subscriptions and calendar publishing, for sharing calendars with others, and offers the ability to both color code and group calendars for easy control over what's displayed.
Another new calendar is CalGoo, a Java-based cross-platform calendaring client for Windows, Mac and Linux. It uses Google Calendar as the synchronization intermediary to keep a user's calendar up-to-date on whatever platform they have. It too supports color-coded calendars, grouped calendars, and the threaded display of multiple calendars. Because there is so much activity going on in the Web and desktop calendaring client space, there are new blogs focused solely on these new releases. Calendar-Review, for example, currently lists almost 50 calendars that it has covered (and the list is not exhaustive), and Calendar Swamp regularly covers the new and exciting in the world of calendars.