Getting even more Cozi with Google

My Labor day efforts are progressing well. Now that I have completed all of the PC and Mac upgrades I began my efforts to deal with our on-line calendering challenges.

First some background, I am a big believer in electronic calendars and have been one through the various generations we have gone through to get to the calendar standards that exist today.

My family is not necessarily with me in this passion. My youngest, being young, can keep her very busy schedule in her head, but since the rest of the family's mind-reading skills leave something to be desired, this occasionally leads to scheduling conflicts.

My oldest keeps her electronic calendar on her phone, which works great for her.

My wife loves her paper planner, but since she keeps it with her most of the time, it tends to only benefit her for the most part. So you can see the challenge my family (and I bet your family too) faces in keeping our schedules in synch.

We have been using Cozi, (well at least my wife and I have), which is a very nice product, for a couple of years. It provides nice ways of handling busy days (via word wrap) and creating nice printed output (I know this defeats the purpose of an on-line calendar, to a certain extent). Unfortunately, Cozi, most likely to in a failed attempt to hold onto their users, is not adopting enough of the calendar sharing standards. They do offer the ability to subscribe to external calendars and synchronization to Outlook (a mixed bag), but when you are trying to deal with 4 people, a dog (yes the dog has her own schedule of medications, vet visits, etc), 2 schools, 2 jobs and multiple musical organizations it just wasn't scaling.

I made one last attempt this weekend to make Cozi work for me, by reading through their forums. While several people have made the kind of suggestions I think would make Cozi the kind of product I would use, thus far they have not reacted or implemented them.

Google's Calendar functionality has always been just shy of what I wanted, but I have kept watching and checking back to see what changes they have been making. Finally, it looks like they have the right combination of features to make the move. Of course Google has many more resources then Cozi so they are capable to chasing down competitors when they want to (kind of like that little company in Redmond has been doing for years on the desktop).

So what made me make the switch (and put in a few hours of data entry as well):

• Standards - All of Google's calendars can be presented or embedded in XML, HTML, iCAL. Standards not only allow sharing of a calendar but also allows web sites to update them as one executes things like buying airline tickets or booking hotels, avoiding manual entry of this type of entry.
  
• Layering - While Cozi lets you create a calendar by person / animal, Google let me do this as well, plus create calendars for institutions (schools) and import sports teams calendars.
• Customization, it is easy to view one, two or whatever combination of calendars I want to at a given time. It is also easy to change this view on demand.
• Privacy - I can keep individual calendars private and institutional calendars public thus allowing me to share these calendars with web sites and others who want to put them to use in whatever ways they want.

So at this point I have imported or re-entered data from Cozi, our schools and musical organizations and have a nice workable family calendar that can be displayed via its web address, is viewable as a widget on my iGoogle page and is embedded in the home page I built for my wife. It can also be synced with my Outlook work calendar, but that is for another day.

I will also publish the public calendars I created so others can leverage my labor over this Labor day weekend.