sampa : colin’s blog

There’s already been a decent amount of blogging about Google Calendar (such as this entry), so I’m not going to talk about most features. In general, it’s a pretty powerful, very nice to use (due to extensive use of Ajax) calendar app.

It lacks some key group/multi-calendar related functionality compared to some alternatives such as AirSet though. We’ve been using AirSet for a while now, finding it quite powerful.

What’s nice in airset is that when you are working in one calendar, when you add an entry, you can specify that you wish to have that entry also show up (share it basically) with some of the other calendars (AirSet actually calls calendars ‘groups’, which makes some sense, as they’re really calendars for groups of users). But this is true sharing, the entry is in only one calendar. In Google Calendar, it seems the only thing you can do is copy the entry to that other calendar. Then they are completely separate entries. Changes to one don’t get propagated to the other.
On top of that, AirSet also allows you to in any calendar (group) set it up so it automatically shares events to other calendars (groups). Other calendars can see the events, but not modify them. In this way you can have calendars that have their own events, but also act as aggregators for events from other calendars.
While this kind of functionality may be of little use to somebody managing just their own calendar, it’s very useful for handling calendars in a group scenario. A group can have a calendar focused around a specific type of task, but the event will still show up on other calendars that are meant to group everything together. Even in a family scenario this is very useful, much more powerful than just (what Google allows) having separate calendars, and checking off which ones you wish to see.