Google Calendar as a Replacement to Outlook

One of the main reasons I sat down to write my previous blog Incorporate Google Calendar Into Outlook is the issue with synchronization of Google Calendar with my cell phone. Well, today Google announced that not only are they "working on full calendar syncing for mobile phones and other devices", but they've released a new set of commands you can use with SMS messaging to retrieve information about your incoming events and even post events to your calendar (which was only do-able with a bit of trickery before.)

This still falls short of the functionality we'd have with a full-on-sync, but it gets us a bit closer. To write a simple WAP-enabled web-based calendar to at least plug into a private RSS feed and display future events doesn't seem so hard. Perhaps I'll write that over the weekend.

Something else cool that was announced today was an official Google Calendar Plug-In for Google Desktop. It's an improvement from Manas Tungare's goocal and supports alerts (make sure you turn them on by going into Desktop's Options>Customize Alerts and checking GoogleCalendar), so it pretty much negates the need for Outlook for event reminders. That is, unless you have multiple calendars. Currently, like many other Google Calendar tools, it only displays items from your main calendar. C'mon, Google: Throw us a bone!

So you might not be quite ready to throw out your Outlook calendar for Google, but at least we're getting closer.