CalendarReview

The next Mobile Calendaring Interoperability Test Event will take place on Tuesday-Thursday, November 4-6, 2008, in Plzen, Czech Republic, hosted by Kerio Technologies. This event is open to both CalConnect members and non-members (members receive a discount upon the registration fee). You must register in advance. The registration form is at Mobile IOP Test Event Participant Registration.

Registration is now open for Roundtable XII and the associated CalConnect Interoperability Test Event, October 6-10, 2008 in Sunnyvale, California, hosted by Yahoo! Inc.. Please see CalConnect XIII for logistics and links to the registration pages for the Roundtable and for the IOP test event.

Presdo just launched their new, innovative event scheduling tool. According to the website, Presdo “takes the hassle out of trying to find the best time to get together with people. Use Presdo to minimize the annoying ping pong of email, texting, and voicemail when organizing the next team lunch or trying to grab coffee with a friend. ”

Presdo is entirely web-based and has a simple natural language interface for entering the information needed to create events. It can export events to many calendars, such as Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, and Apple iCal.

The company was started by one of LinkedIn’s founders.

CalendarReview.com originally started when I founded MarkThisDate.com , a public calendar portal. We were looking at so many calendar apps at that time that we decided to bundle our knowledge at CalendarReview.com. MarkThisDate let’s it’s visitors add public calendars (sports, business, holiday, concerts etc) for other visitors to download to their calendar app. Currently our users are able to add public calendars to Outlook XP/2003/2007, Vista Calendar, iCal, Google Calendar, Netvibes, Lotus Notes, Calgoo, ePointment, Hiptop/Sidekick, Horde, Korganizer, Kronolith, Lightning, Microsoft Works 6.0/7.0/8.0, Mozilla Calendar, Novell Evolution, Palm Desktop, Plaxo, Sunbird and Zimbra and some RSS readers. We want to be complete so if you know any other calendar app or you run a calendar app yourself  that imports (or better subscribes to) vcs or ics files please contact us at blog @ calendarreview.com or info @ markthisdate.com .

Registration is now open for CalConnect Roundtable XII and the associated CalConnect Interoperability Test Events, June 2-6, 2008, hosted by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in Madison, Wisconsin. Logistics information and links to the registration pages may be found at http://www.calconnect.org/roundtable12.shtml

The CalConnect Interoperability Test Event will occur from Monday morning the 2nd (starting at 08:30) through noon Wednesday the 4th; the Roundtable from noon Wednesday the 4th through 13:00 Friday the 6th.

Non-members of CalConnect are invited to attend a single Roundtable as an observer to determine whether or not joining CalConnect would be of benefit to you. Non-members may also attend a single CalConnect Interoperability Test Event as observers, as well. Information on observer status and registration is also linked from the above page. You can add the Calconnect events to your calendar by selecting your calendar here:

Online travel organization startup TripIt will today release some new features that aim to further simplify booking travel online. TripIt now syncs itineraries with any personal calendar that supports iCal, including Google Calendar, Outlook 2007, Plaxo, and others. What this means is that TripIt users no longer need to manually update their calenders with trip information; TripIt now does it all, adding details such as flights, hotels, rental cars, restaurant reservations to supported apps.

InstantOGo 2.0 has been released. InstantOGo is a bundled drop-in version of the Open Source OpenGroupware.Org application suite. OpenGroupware.Org provides sophisticated calendering including meeting proposals, free/busy, CalDAV & iCalendar support, and an XML-RPC API. In addition to calendering OpenGroupare is a fully functional enterprise groupware solution including project and file management (access via API, WebDAV, and Web), tasks with workflow, and flexible contact management. GroupDAV is also supported.

www.KeepandShare.com has an online calendar service that’s different from a lot of the other ones here. KeepandShare’s calendar is very simple - it’s modeled after a wall-calendar with each day box being just unlimited free text entry. No messing with appointment objects. It’s very fast to use, and you can put a lot of info into a day if you want, especially in the ‘day view’.

The calendar is wrapped with powerful control over secure, private sharing, and besides the calendar you can access file sharing, documents, photos, lists and more in the same account and the same sharing controls.

Some features of www.keepandshare.com calendar are:

• Just click and type. It’s as easy as a wall calendar.
• Keep your schedule online: accessible from any computer
• Easy to use - just click and type!
• Securely share your calendar: they’ll always see the up-to-date version
• Up to nine separate calendars
• Unlimited text in each day
• Day, week & month views

Go to here for more info on the KeepandShare calendar.

Availion extends reach of AvailiTime, its calendar (free/busy) sharing software

Dallas, Texas March 26, 2007 – AvailiTime, the first in internet based schedule coordination across business and network boundaries, announces the addition of Salesforce.com to its suite of available calendars including Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, and Google Calendar. With this latest addition, AvailiTime sets its sights on the 646,000 subscribers of Salesforce.com as potential users of its free availability sharing service.

Since its launch in January 2007, AvailiTime has been focused on adding support for PC and web-based calendars to their availability sharing service. While the vast majority of their current user base uses Microsoft Outlook, AvailiTime regularly adds support for more calendars to maximize the social spread of the service. The next planned release will include support for the iCalendar standard, which will enable interaction with users of popular new web based calendars, such as 30 Boxes.

For many professionals, the calendar is the frontline tool used to manage day-to-day business. Any given appointment entry contains the entire definition of an event, not just time and duration, but description, location, attendees, and often private notes about the engagement. Most calendar sharing solutions go too far, sharing every intimate detail of an event, while others do not share across calendar or network boundaries. Consider Microsoft Outlook, which can share free/busy information, but effectively only with an Exchange Server, and then only with users on the local network. Most professionals meet with people outside of their organization, and while these external interactions define a company’s image in the marketplace, it is this class of meeting that is the most underserved segment of the calendar management market.

“For us, AvailiTime addressed problems that we faced every day as technology consultants.” – Joseph Hill, cofounder Availion

While traditional solutions focus on sharing or synchronizing your calendar, AvailiTime facilitates the scheduling process by giving its users tools to manage the most important component of appointment scheduling: availability.

“All we needed was a simple way to share the times that we are available with the people that we meet with. We shouldn’t be required to use a calendar that is dictated by others or change the way we use our calendar to accomplish this.” – Mark Terry, cofounder Availion

AvailiTime is a free schedule collaboration service with a set of pro features that are available for a small monthly fee. The full set of features can been found on the AvailiTime website at www.availitime.com.

About Availion
Availion LLC is a North Texas based company founded in 2006 by Joseph M. Hill and Mark W. Terry. Availion LLC is the creator of AvailiTime, the internet based schedule coordination software.

Note: The Availion name, AvailiTime name, and the AvailiTime logo are the property of Availion LLC. All other brands, trademarks or service marks are the property of their respective holders.