Webware

Google Calendar has quickly become one of my favorite online tools. I can schedule meetings quickly and it integrates seamlessly into my workflow. It's a great service.

But I want more from it.

That's why I've been sifting through Mozilla's Firefox extension database trying to find some add-ons that take Google Calendar to the next level. Whether they enhance its usability or just improve its effectiveness, there are a handful of extensions that work quite well.

Google Calendar extensions

Better GCal After I installed Better GCal, I was extremely impressed by what it offered. From a new skin to little extras like week numbers and collapsible headers, it makes Google Calendar just a little better. The extension not only made me more organized, but the calendar became far more readable.

Better GCal has a great skin to try out.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

GCal Popup GCal Popup is a really neat idea. Instead of forcing you to open a new tab to add an event to your Google Calendar, you'll only need to open the extension and it will display your Google Calendar over your current Web page. Input the event you want to add to your calendar and once you're done, you can close the extension and go back to work.

GCal Popup is designed to make it convenient to add events to your Calendar and it succeeds. But beware that it's an "experimental" extension, so it might cause some instability issues. That said, I haven't experienced any such problems.

GCal Popup makes it easy to add events to your calendar.

(Credit: GCal Popup)

ScheduleOnce, the service that helps multiple users find the best time to have a meeting, has new(ish) tool that lets users access its service without leaving the Google Calendar interface.

Using it requires installing a small add-on that currently works only in Firefox and IE with IE7Pro installed. Users then get a new ScehduleOnce menu in the left side of Calendar, either through Google Apps, or in the public version of Google Calendar. The control widget lets them see a list of meetings they have scheduled, along with the option to create a new one as if they were doing so back on ScheduleOnce.

What's really interesting about this add-on is that as of this week, it could no longer require the download to work. On Tuesday Google opened up a new API for developers to create sidebar gadgets in Calendar. A widget that makes use of this could let users keep track of tentative meetings they've set up, however any scheduling may still require going back to ScheduleOnce's site.

(Credit: ScheduleOnce)

This is how exciting my organizational life is right now.

(Credit: CNET)

In a move sure to please organizational fanatics, Google has graduated Tasks from Gmail Labs. In and of itself, it's not big news, since anyone's been able to enable the feature inside their own accounts since late 2008. It is, however, the first thing to graduate from Gmail Labs, which is a proving ground for features Google does not think to be ready for prime time.

In a blog post about the promotion, Google made it clear that less popular Labs features may eventually get the axe, however the company has not made a public listing of how the various features rank. To its credit, Tasks was not relegated to Gmail alone, which could be one of the big factors in its success. Google spun it out to Google Calendar, as well as making it a standalone widget that could be accessed off site.

Tasks is also one of the most vanilla, yet marketable of all of the Labs add-ons. It shares company with things like mail goggles--a tool that makes you do math problems when attempting to send late night e-mails, an instant message translator that can convert messages written in other languages, along with an add-on that lets users navigate their in-boxes with mouse gestures. While neat, these fully-functioning features are less marketable to enterprise customers looking to consolidate their organizational tools.

Google Calendar gets labs section

Along with the graduation of Tasks, Google has brought a labs section over to its calendar service. There are now six experimental features that can be used to enable additional features such as changing the look and feel of your calendar with a background image, or seeing when your next meeting is going to occur down to the number of hours and minutes.

Google has also created a public API that will let application developers create widgets that exist alongside the calendar. This will likely speed up the development of things users can add-on to their calendars, the same way it did when Google opened up development for its mapping applications. Google has still not done this with Gmail, and instead, has chosen to have developers come to it when wanting to create new add-ons such as the content plug-ins for sites like Yelp and Flickr.

The new Labs add-ons in Google Calendar let users tweak various parts of the service.

(Credit: CNET)

Google Apps have all grown up.

No longer must Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk carry the beta tag of shame; they are all now full-fledged members of the Google family of products. Google has been hinting this was coming over the past few months, but is finally ready to make the official announcement along with the news that Fairchild Semiconductor has decided to embrace Google's suite of Web-based office productivity applications.

In truth, it's hard to tell exactly what technical advancements may have prompted the decision to lift the products out of beta. Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, said the removal of the beta status means that those products have all reached unspecified internal metrics in terms of reliability and usability.

But Google does not have a company standard for determining when a beta project has become a more fully formed product: Gmail was in beta for five years. And paying enterprise customers will still be provided with a 99.9 percent service-level agreement now that the products are out of beta. That's the same level of service Google agreed to provide while they were in beta.

Still, Google thinks there are a number of CIOs that will find Google Apps easier to sell to their bosses if it's not formally known as a "beta" product. "It's something that does send the wrong message," Glotzbach said, referring to the historical definition of the word beta as a not-ready-for-prime-time piece of software. Google is working on developing more formal company-wide standards for how to label products with the beta tag, he said.

In the meantime, Google has added a couple of more enterprise-quality features to Gmail, allowing executives to give their assistants permission to manage their mail and corporations to set e-mail retention policies for their workers, a key feature needed by highly scrutinized companies such as Intel.

Clicking the Offline Beta link gets the installation started.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

When Google announced that Google Calendar users could read events even while not connected to a network, the feature was only for organizations using Google Apps for their Internet domains. Now the offline calendar feature can be used more broadly, though.

The feature is available by clicking the "Offline Beta" link in the upper right side of the page. Clicking on it walks the user through an installation and initial synchronization process.

As with offline Gmail, the service uses Google's Gears software to store a copy of the calendar data on a person's computer so it can accessed while the network is down. Unlike the Gmail version, new items can't be created or modified while offline.

Offline Gmail is available only in some English-speaking countries; it wasn't immediately clear how widespread offline Gmail Calendar access is.

(Via Google Operating System.)

Google explains what offline Google Calendar enables during the installation.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google Calendar's offline features relies on Google's open-source Gears software.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Once installed, Google Calendar synchronizes its locally stored data with that on the Web site.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

As promised, Google has begun releasing offline calendar support for Google Apps customers, a move that makes Google's online tools a bit more competitive for business users.

The company said offline Google Calendar would arrive soon after its launch of offline Gmail last week. However, while offline Gmail is for anyone who installs the experimental feature, offline Calendar only works with Google Apps customers whose administrators have enabled their users to activate experimental features.

The folks at Lifehacker got the offline Calendar update and offered some views of the synchronization process that stores a copy of your calendar on your local machine.

Also as promised, people using their calendars while offline can only read existing entries, not create new ones. For details, check Google's Offline Calendar FAQ page.

As with offline Gmail, the offline Calendar support uses Gears, browser plug-in software developed by Google that enables data to be stored on a person's computer so Web applications can be used even while offline.

"Offline Calendar currently works on Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 2 and 3, and Safari 3. Support for other browsers is coming soon," according to the FAQ.

Update 8:46 a.m. PST: Google confirmed it's begun activating the offline support. It will be available for customers using the free, ad-supported Standard Edition of Google Apps and the Premium Edition, which costs $50 per user per year, Google said.

Update 8:59 a.m. PST: Joyce Sohn, Google Apps marketing manager, discussed the offline Calendar move at the Google Enterprise blog.

Google declined to say when read-write access will arrive or when offline calendars will arrive for ordinary Google Calendar users. "We've seen the strongest interest in this feature from our enterprise users, so we're bringing it to them first," spokesman Andrew Kovacs said.

Google on Monday formally announced full support for the CalDAV protocol along with the release of a small piece of software for Mac computers that lets users easily link up their Google Calendars with the iCal application.

Google had previously launched CalDAV support back in late July, however, consumers had to manually add their calendars directly to CalDAV-supporting applications like Mozilla Sunbird and Apple's iCal. The new Mac utility, named "Calaboration" simply lets users plug in their Google Calendar username and password to send Google calendars over to iCal. The benefit of doing this is the two-way sync. This means whatever changes you make on either end will be synced up to both every few minutes.

I gave Calaboration a spin this morning, and after restarting iCal, it worked without problems. With the current implementation you're able to see other people's schedules, as well as reply yes, no, or maybe to calendar invitations. The only problems I ran into early on were syncing errors where iCal would not let me write data to Google's servers, which was remedied with a closing and reopening of the program after the initial CalDAV setup.

You can grab Calaboration here. If you're a Sunbird user, there's a simple provider extension that does the same thing.

Calaboration lets you pick which Google Calendars you want to sync up with iCal. The same thing can be done in Mozilla's Sunbird or any other calendaring tool with CalDAV support.

(Credit: Google)

If you've been on the fence about ditching Outlook for Google Apps you might want to give Google's efforts another look. In a blog post this morning the company outlined some of the ways Google Calendar has improved over the past month with a handful of small, but important features. Many of them are aimed squarely at business users.

One of the new improvements, flexible reminders, seems like the most minor--but it's not. Setting up reminders in the previous system had presets on when you'd be able to get the message. The new system is far more customizable and lets you drop in whatever time you want, complete with an option for days, which means you could set a reminder years in advance. You can still set whether you want it as a pop-up, e-mail or SMS message, the last of which I find to be the most useful if your mobile phone doesn't sync up with Google Calendar.

The other major improvement, which is more business-centric is the option to selectively e-mail meeting attendees. Like Outlook you can now get a separate list of people who have replied yes, no, or maybe and e-mail specific groups without perturbing the others. In both the business and social world, this is a great way to send notices and reminders without spamming the in-boxes of people who have already responded.

Alongside these two features is a slight upgrade to the event creation tool which now allows for overlapping events, as well as a new two-click calendar subscription shortcut that lets you subscribe to someone else's calendar without having to deal with special invites or permissions.

One of the updated features is the option to create new draggable calendar events over other ones. Previously you'd have to create it elsewhere then drag it over--making it a two-step process.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

Mac users who use Google Calendar and iCal to manage their on and offline calendaring have had to use a myriad of third-party products to keep the two in sync. That's changed now that Google is including CalDAV support as part of Google Calendar's built-in functionality. This means you'll be able to make changes in iCal and have them instantly reflected in Google and vice-versa. Previously that data swap was a one-way affair, with users simply subscribing to their Google Calendar feeds in iCal.

CalDAV is a standardized sharing protocol, allowing you to access the same set of data with others to edit and sync data changes between multiple users. On a workflow level, this means people with access to edit your Google Calendar will be able to make changes in both iCal and Google Calendar that will sync up with both.

To make use of it on a Mac you'll need the latest version of iCal, which comes with OS X (Leopard). It has native support for CalDAV subscriptions, as does Mozilla Sunbird, but Google says it's currently not supported.

One thing to note is that the current iteration of CalDAV support on Google's part is not perfect. The support article on known issues is somewhat lengthy, with show-stoppers like the inability to create new iCal calendars from Google Calendar, and reminders and alarms not moving to the other platform when created. Until some of those issues are ironed out, getting perfect sync will require one of the many third-party tools that does the legwork for you (see Calgoo, Spanning Sync, and Plaxo).

[via Google Operating System]