Google calendar has become my preferred way of keeping track and coordinating events with my wife, family, cohousing community, friends, travel and almost anything else that is temporal it seems. The hard exception is work, which till recently used "Meeting Maker", a piece of bloatware that had no way to exchange calendars in any known, open format, but now is based on Microsoft Exchange.
Exchange doesn't have an ical feed (that Google Calendar can easily consume, and that I've set almost everything else up to produce for its' consumption), however Exchange sends event data as iCalendar attachments in emails. Thankfully, Google Mail (Gmail and mail for apps) recognizes the text/calendar attachments, parses the iCalendar info, and offers to add it to your Google Calendar.
Amazingly, Exchange also will parse and allow Google Calendar invites (which are also iCalendar format) to be added (or refused) to my work calendar (I just had to get the correct email address to send it to for it to work!), there is a bit of broken-ness in dealing with replies to invitations from Google Calendar, but that I can bear to kludge by hand.
An well-documented, open, hardly novel way of exchanging calendar information by email is fantastic and I've added such attachments to the GO online meal signup and shift system, here's an example (part of a multipart/alternative message):
Exchange doesn't have an ical feed (that Google Calendar can easily consume, and that I've set almost everything else up to produce for its' consumption), however Exchange sends event data as iCalendar attachments in emails. Thankfully, Google Mail (Gmail and mail for apps) recognizes the text/calendar attachments, parses the iCalendar info, and offers to add it to your Google Calendar.
Amazingly, Exchange also will parse and allow Google Calendar invites (which are also iCalendar format) to be added (or refused) to my work calendar (I just had to get the correct email address to send it to for it to work!), there is a bit of broken-ness in dealing with replies to invitations from Google Calendar, but that I can bear to kludge by hand.
An well-documented, open, hardly novel way of exchanging calendar information by email is fantastic and I've added such attachments to the GO online meal signup and shift system, here's an example (part of a multipart/alternative message):
------=MIME_BOUNDRY_altpparts
Content-Type: text/calendar; charset="utf-8"; method=REQUEST
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=invite.ics
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Grot Org//Meal tracker//EN
VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:REQUEST
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20090203T231500Z
DTEND:20090204T000000Z
DTSTAMP:20090129T154454Z
ORGANIZER;CN=go-meal:mailto:foo@plzs.org
UID:1680@meals.plzs.org
ATTENDEE;CUTYPE=INDIVIDUAL;ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;PARTSTAT=ACCEPTED;RSVP=FALSE;CN=Fitzgerald/Aditya;X-NUM-GUESTS=4:mailto:nobody@grot.org
CLASS:PRIVATE
CREATED:20090203T130300Z
DESCRIPTION:Wings Over Great Oak by tim details at https://example.com/meal-signup/show?m=1680
LAST-MODIFIED:20090129T154454Z
LOCATION:go-meal
SEQUENCE:0
STATUS:CONFIRMED
SUMMARY:Wings Over Great Oak (go-meal)\, 4 diners
TRANSP:OPAQUE
BEGIN:VALARM
ACTION:DISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:REMINDER
TRIGGER;RELATED=START:-PT15M
END:VALARM
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
------=MIME_BOUNDRY_altpparts--
