Who Owns Your Calendar?
The buzz about Google Calendar and my experience with enterprise calendaring systems like Outlook and Lotus notes had me thinking a bit. Why does the corporation own your Calendar?
Tim Bray writes about a solution to share your calendar between family members. I dare you to replicate it. And woe to you who try to solve this by synchronizing your PDA to your work and home computers.
Sharing free/busy information with family members, professional colleagues and service providers would be a great productivty gain for all of us. Microsoft presented a fictional video illustrating the future of DotNet of this in 2000. A mobile user called his dentist who was able to schedule a meeting that fit both their calendars. Very convenient. From the DotNet white paper (courtesy of Joel’s article on Architecture Astronauts).
The next generation of the Windows desktop platform, Windows.NET supports productivity, creativity, management, entertainment and much more, and is designed to put users in control of their digital lives.
The reality is, the Enterpise (our employer) still hosts our Calendars, they decide what PDAs you can use to synchronize a portable copy of your schedule (if any. For example, my employer allows me to synchronize Blackberrys if I pay Rogers $75 a month for synchronization access through public wireless. There is no synchronization solution through USB or wireless LAN). They decide what external parties can see the free/busy information in your Calendar (typically none, certainly not your dentist, professional acquaintances, or spouse). Web based calendaring is pretty much irrelevant since most Enterprises are not going to let you synchronize your Calendar to them.
The situation is unlikely to change anytime soon, because there is little value to Enterprises who provide their employees with calendaring software. Probably 2% of us really want control of our digital lives and would be willing to cough up $10 or $20 a month for a Calendar service they would provide their employer access to rather than the other way around. Providers of outsourced enterprise services (i.e. IBM who often has contracts to run and support workstations, corporate email etc) are going to charge an extra chunk of money to support users with a synchronized calandar solution. Companys with their own IT support aren’t going to want to support this either.
The value of sharing free/busy information for corporations is limited. A few employees want to share this information with their spouse, a few might more might like to share this with professional acquaintances. Individual corporations just don’t have a financial motive to enable this. It would probably cost more than the benefits they would receive. At least until there is a critical mass and 20% of folks would like to share the calendar with their spouse, dentist, etc. And the value of information contained in your personal appointments to the corporation is priceless.
It is worth noting that Outlook does allow you to share free/busy information. I have no idea if this is restricted in many corporate environments, if Notes has a similar feature and whether it would be restricted in a corporate environment, or how well it really works. Maybe the Outlook/Exchange platform is already there, and all Outlook users already have a solution?
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