Calgoo Connect & Hub - Calendar Syncing And Sharing Made Easy

Aug. 11th, 2008 | by Abhijeet Mukherjee |

The availability of desktop calendars like MS Outlook Calendar and iCal and free online calendars like Google Calendar have certainly made managing schedules quick and easy. However when it comes to sharing and syncing calendars, there are still not many good solutions available which are free and convenient to work with. It’s not an easy task to share your calendars with friends, especially if you have a lot of them and they use different types of calendar applications.

Enter Calgoo, a suite of calendar apps which offers an excellent free solution to syncing and sharing calendars across different platforms. Apart from offering its own calendar software, it offers Calgoo Connect and Calgoo Hub which are meant for syncing and sharing calendars respectively.

Calgoo Connect

Calgoo Connect, as I mentioned, is a tool which lets you sync desktop calendars like Outlook or iCal with online calendars like 30 boxes and Google Calendar. It quietly works in the background synchronizing your online calendar with your desktop calendar and any changes you make on one of them reflect on the other.

It supports the following calendar programs :-

• MS Outlook 2003 Calendar
• MS Outlook 2007 Calendar
• Google Calendar
• Apple iCal
• 30 boxes
• And Calgoo’s own calendar program

It’s important to note that although Windows user have some good calendar sync options available, Mac users still don’t have a free solution to sync iCal to Google Calendar. Hence Calgoo connect should be a useful app for them. This could also help you easily sync your iCal with Outlook calendar if you own both a PC and a Mac.

Calgoo Hub

Calgoo Hub does the more difficult task of sharing your calendars with friends who may not be using the same calendar.

As you can see in the screenshot above, it supports most of the popular calendar programs including Sunbird and Plaxo Calendar. Calgoo Hub is basically an online storage for your calendar from where you can share it with your friends or just publish for public view.

Features

1. Publish Calendar Online

Calgoo Hub, as I mentioned, lets you publish your default calendar online. It supports all the popular calendars with a few exceptions (like MS Vista Calendar ). Google Calendar, 30 boxes and Outlook 2003 require you to download and install a plugin to publish to Calgoo Hub.

2. Support For Multiple Calendar Applications

Support for multiple calendar programs is a big advantage and hence you don’t need to worry about the type of calendar which your friend is using while sharing it. Although Plaxo Calendar, MS Windows Vista Calendar and Calendar Hub cannot publish to Calgoo Hub but they can still easily subscribe to a Calgoo Hub calendar.

3. Easily Share Calendars through Email

This is what makes Calgoo Hub an awesome calendar sharing app. You can share it with anyone who has a valid email address. It sends a preview link to your calendar in the email to your friend and also gives detailed steps to add it to his deafualt calendar program.

4. Subscribe to a Calgoo Hub Calendar

Calgoo Hub assigns a specific address starting with webcal:// to your calendar and hence using that address, one can easily subscribe to it in his preferred calendar program

5. Preview in Cell Phone

And finally, apart from giving an online preview option, you can also preview your calendar on your cell phone which means that it is optimized from the mobile internet as well.

Calgoo is undoubtedly one of the most comprehensive calendar software suites which focuses on calendar interoperability rather than just specific tasks like two-way syncing of particular calendars. And since it’s free now, it has become more useful than ever.