Google sets your calendar free!

It’s been a long time since anyone thought of Google as “the good guys”. Though they have waged a war with Microsoft for everything from search to word processing, they have become more like the Redmond clan than they would ever want to admit. But, still, how can you not love them?

And now they’ve launched what a colleague of mine rightly refers to as the Holy Grail: a simple tool that will sync your Microsoft Outlook calendar with your Google Calendar.

For many of us who are adopting a more and more “googled” way of working, this has been the one critical piece of the puzzle that has been missing for a long time. And here it is.

The simple reason why this is such big news is that many people (myself included) want our information to have more mobility. That means I want my documents, for example, wherever I am, whatever device I’m using, mine or borrowed. Critical to this are my email and calendar.

Microsoft has kindly given us a calendar application, in the form of MS Outlook, which is both ubiquitous and utterly proprietary. Unlike just any other calendaring tool out there, it doesn’t support iCalendar format, which means you cannot easily get your data out of it and into another calendar, such as Google’s. There have been various attempts to hack this in the past year or so, but none has been very good at it.

This has meant that this one critical part of my data has been locked to one specific machine at my office. Now, there are many other ways to solve this. For one, I have a smart phone that I can sync with my computer. Other people have web-based versions of Outlook provided via Microsoft Exchange that allow remote access. But none of these has the elegance and the sheer simplicity of being able to log on to my single Google account and have my calendar right there.

I already use Google for document writing, analytics, storing snippets of cut-and-paste web pages (using Google Notebook) and (some) emailing. Within the past six months, Google has dramatically improved its sign-on process so that I really have all their various tools on one dashboard. I think it still has some work to do on the slickness of its user interfaces, but the fact is, more and more, I have a truly portable computer that exists only in the memory and storage of Google’s servers.

Calendar sharing, of course, is also now a cinch, even for people who want to use their Outlook as their primary calendaring tool.

The last great problem is that of sign-on. Because Google requires each user to have an account different from their normal network logon, this creates duplication that is annoying and hard to overcome, particularly with more “average” users. Integrating with a local network seems unlikely, but I do think Google should find a way to let my Gmail account collect my local email. If it did that, I could pretty much turn Outlook off altogether, which, I don’t mind saying, is the kind of thing I dream about frequently.

Google is showing us an image of a world that is only starting to emerge. There are lots and lots and lots of others that are offering competitive, even superior, tools to what Google has, but none offering them in such a seamless and integrated way. To feel that you can leave the office but carry a lot of your actual computing needs with you in the form a single username and password … well … that’s pretty damn great.

What else can one really say?