As a part of my Living in the Cloud series, I wrote about Gmail last week. This week, I am planning to write about Google Calendar and I will write about Remember The Milk, a todo application, next week. Google Calendar has been a boon for me both in my personal as well as professional life. Even though it may not be the best calendaring application, it takes care of my need to be organized in my life.

After giving up on Yahoo Calendar, which finally had some improvements recently, I was desperately looking for an online calendaring app and Google offered a tool that could serve as an unified calendaring application with many powerful features. In this post, I will offer a brief overview of how I use Google Calendar and then, as I did in my previous post on Gmail, discuss the pros and cons of Google Calendar. I have a personal account in Google. My company uses Google Apps for domains and we also have a Google Apps for our family domain. Through my Google Calendar interface, I could access all my calendars in one place making it extremely easy for me to keep tabs on both my professional and personal lives.

The greatest advantage of cloud computing is the possibility to pull my data from anywhere using a vast array of devices. We can access Google Calendar using the web browser or desktop mail clients such as MS Outlook, Thunderbird, etc. or mobile phones, etc.. It is also possible to publish our calendars to free/busy servers, blogs, wikis and other websites. This flexibility offered by Google Calendar, in particular, and Cloud Computing Apps, in general, makes it easy to organize my life in a much more efficient way.

Let us now discuss the pros and cons of Google Calendar. As I did in my previous post on Gmail, I am only going to discuss those pros and cons I consider as very important. There may be others I have left out due to various considerations and I strongly encourage the readers to add their take on Google Calendar in the comments section below.

Pros:

• Multiple calendars: We can add multiple calendars, one for professional life, one for personal life, one for the Golf club, one for the Startup club, etc.. We can have different colors for different calendars making it easy to categorize the events.
• Multiple Ways to Access it: We can access it using the web browser, native calendaring app, mobile phones, blogs and websites, etc. There are third party apps like Nemussync that will integrate Google Calendar with smartphone/iPhone's native calendar app.
• Browser Plugins: There are plugins available for browsers like Firefox making it easy to add events without even visiting the Google Calendar web application.
• Collaboration: We can easily invite more people to join an event and they can accept the invitation with a single click. This added with the in-built commenting system and integration with Google Maps makes Google Calendar as powerful as Evite, an events management web application.
• Natural Language Support: Google offers support for natural language. One can add tasks using natural language and Google parses it correctly. For example, one can just use Quick Add button and type "Meet Steve on Sunday at 7:00 PM" and it will be parsed properly and the corresponding date and time will be added to the event.
• Integration with Google Sites: Google Calendar can be integrated with Google Sites (formerly Jotspot). This is very useful for companies using Google Sites as an intranet.

Cons:

• Lack of direct two way support with desktop calendaring applications. Many individuals and companies are still relying on desktop applications. Lack of direct two way syncing for may desktop apps is a big drawback.
• Lack of offline support. Though there are rumors that Google will soon add offline support with Google Gears, there is no offline support at this point of time.
• The Reminder feature of Google Calendar is unreliable at this point. Many times, I don't get email or sms notifications of the events. I have heard similar complaints from other users too. This is more of a bug than a con.