Coordinating Calendars with AirSet
Awhile back, I posted an article about AirSet, the free online calendar-sharing service. My wife and I have been using that service for a few years now and, with our busy lives (including a teenager and a pre-teen), I don’t know how we’d survive without it.
After having tried unsuccessfully to manage shared calendars for CorsPro within our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, we’ve recently switched to managing our calendars using AirSet. After just a few days, I’m here to tell you that it works great, and it provides an ideal blending of managing BOTH your personal calendar and your work calendar without feeling like you’re giving up the privacy of your personal life for all of your business associates to see.
Figure 1
The key to managing calendars in AirSet is the concept of being able to view multiple calendars and sub-calendars all at once, and to tag others as participants in events so that the events appear in their calendars. For example, my personal calendar for November 19th looked like Figure 1. The event descriptions are a bit cut off so that they can fit neatly into the calendar day’s square, but you can easily see the full details of each event simply by floating your mouse over the event.
All of the items were synchronized back to my Outlook, which in turn was synchronized with my Blackberry. However, I personally only added the two blue-colored items. One is a High Tech Prayer Breakfast that I attended, and the other is a lunch that I scheduled with my dad. The other events were added by others: the 10am and 2pm SalesDoc Architect demo events were added by someone else in my company to the “CorsPro” calendar, and for both of these events I was tagged as a participant. The “Soccer” event (which is my daughter’s soccer practice) was added by my wife to the “Family” calendar, and she tagged me as a participant in the event so that it would be placed in my calendar.
Figure 2
What’s really cool is that in addition to others tagging me as a participant in events, I can also see events that others have shared with me but that I don’t participate in. For example, when I chose to show all events that have been shared with me or for which I’m a participant (see Figure 2), I can see not only the events on my calendar, but I can also see (in this case) events on my wife’s calendar listed in dark blue. They aren’t on my official calendar, and they don’t synch back to Outlook or my Blackberry, but I can see them in AirSet. This enables me to schedule something with my wife without scheduling over an event on her calendar.
My wife has actually shared her entire calendar with me. If you want to be more private, you can choose to share calendar events with others on an event by event basis, and you can even hide the details of those events. Personally, I don’t share my entire calendar with employees, but instead share individual events with the CorsPro calendar (which several of my employees can see) so that someone does not schedule another event for me at the same time.
Figure 3
For November 19th, Figure 3 shows what I’ve shared with the “CorsPro” calendar. Notice that the lunch with my dad appears as “Brian – Busy” because I chose not to share the actual details of the event with others.
As you can see, AirSet provides incredible flexibility in managing and viewing calendars. Because I can view multiple calendars and shared events, I’m able to not only manage my calendar, but I can easily schedule appointments with others who have shared their calendars and events. It’s also free, and it synchronizes well with Outlook, which means it synchronizes with any other device (like my Blackberry) that can synch with Outlook.