From the archive. We first published this in August 2010. Apple's MobileMe has since been replaced by iCloud, and Google Apps is now Google Workspace. BusyCal is still around and still on our Resources page.
Shared calendars let everyone in an office, or a team within it, create, view and edit appointments without a flurry of emails and invitations. Set up well, they fit your existing workflow, work on your phones and tablets, and keep the whole team in sync from anywhere.
This matters most when several people's schedules have to line up: team meetings, client presentations, and appointments that need another team member. With a shared, up-to-date calendar, anyone can book with confidence instead of checking with the office first or rescheduling after a conflict.
Common approaches, and where they fall short
Most clients who asked us about shared calendars had tried one of two things.
Apple's MobileMe. For $100 a year, MobileMe kept calendars and other information in sync across a Mac, iPhone, iPad or PC. Many small businesses tried to share calendars by signing every computer and device into the same account. That is economical, but it has real problems for a business:
- It is all or nothing. You cannot keep a personal calendar on your own computer while sharing a business calendar with your team.
- Data loss. We saw a number of cases of lost or corrupted data when offices synced too many devices to one account.
Project management and CRM tools such as Basecamp and Daylite. These include good shared calendars, along with task assignment, project scheduling and collaboration. For an office that only wants to share calendars, that can feel like using a bazooka when all you need is a flyswatter.
Most of our clients just wanted something simple and reliable that let them keep working the way they already did, with tools their staff already knew.
Our solution: BusyCal and Google Calendar
BusyCal from BusyMac syncs with Google Calendar and can share calendars over your office network. Each person keeps their own personal calendars and also shares group calendars with the team. It replaces iCal, but it looks and works almost the same, so staff can switch without retraining. It also adds recurring to-dos, shareable sticky notes, and plenty of options for fonts and colors.
Keeping the shared calendars at Google adds a safety net. If someone accidentally deletes a calendar on their own Mac, it still exists at Google, because shared calendars can only be deleted on the Google site. BusyCal can also back up your calendars on a schedule, which makes recovering an accidentally deleted appointment easy.
How to get started
- Create Google Calendar accounts. One account per person is best. Everyone can share a single account, but then removing someone later means changing the password for everyone. Separate accounts let you share and unshare calendars person by person.
- Back up your existing calendars and export them in iCal or CSV format.
- Import them into Google Calendar. You can also bring in data from Entourage, Outlook and other calendar apps.
- Install BusyCal on each Mac and connect it to that person's Google account.
- Sync. From then on BusyCal keeps everyone's changes up to date. You can use your calendars in BusyCal, on the Google Calendar website, or on your iPhone or iPad, and BusyCal tracks who last edited each appointment.
Personal calendars that are not part of the shared Google account can stay on your own Mac. If you would rather keep using iCal, BusyMac also made a small utility called BusySync that kept iCal and Google Calendar in sync in the background.