Easier event scheduling in Google Calendar

Posted by Nassar Stoertz, Software Engineer

In the next day or so, you'll start to see some changes to the event page in Google Calendar which should make scheduling events easier. We've made the style more consistent with other Google apps, put information that’s most commonly used at the top of the screen, simplified the layout, and added some functionality.

A new repeating event editor
The old interface for creating recurring events was clumsy and took up too much space on the screen. Now you'll see only a summary of your recurring event on the main event page; if you want to edit it, you can use a window that opens when you select the "Repeats" checkbox.


A new tool to help you find a time for your event
You'll notice a new tab on the event page that should make it easier to find a good time to schedule an event. When your friends or coworkers give you permission to see their calendars, you can click this tab to see a preview of their schedules and hover over their events to see what conflicts they might have. This should make scheduling a tad easier, especially for events with large numbers of guests. For Google Apps users, the new schedule preview can also show data from other calendar services using our Google Calendar Connectors API.


Changes under the hood
As browsers and other technologies both within and outside of Google have evolved, we've found it necessary to occasionally make structural code changes in order to keep up. These visible changes are only the surface; underneath we've added a new model for how we represent calendar events in the browser and a new mechanism for how we make sure those events get properly saved. We've paid special attention to performance, consistency, and extensibility. In the short term, you'll hopefully notice that the event page opens slightly faster than it did before.

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Google Calendar Sync now supports Outlook 2010

Posted by Alice Brown, Google Calendar Team

Making sure that your calendar is available to you whenever and wherever you need it is important. That's why Google Calendar works with a number of desktop applications and mobile devices including iCal, iPhone and iPad, Blackberry, Android, Nokia/Symbian, and Windows Mobile phones. Google Calendar Sync for Outlook is also available, but one thing was missing — until now.

Google Calendar Sync now supports Outlook 2010 — our top feature request. Outlook 2010 comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and currently only 32-bit is supported. To start syncing your calendar with Outlook 2010, download Google Calendar Sync version 0.9.3.6. Once you install it, a Settings window will appear. Enter your account’s email address and password, choose your sync option and sync frequency, and you’re done! (Note: If you’re already using Google Calendar Sync, you’ll still need to download and install this new version in order to be able to sync with Outlook 2010. If you need help, take a look at our getting started guide.)

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A new look for Google Calendar

Posted by Joe Ashear, User Experience Designer

When I came to Google four years ago, a small group of engineers was putting the finishing touches on a calendar application. A few of us started using it, and I remember thinking, "Wow! It's so fresh and shiny and new!"

But over time the shiny new Calendar started to feel a little bit old, a little out of step with other Google Apps. So we rolled up our sleeves and we tweaked the layout, we twiddled the colors and we tuned the text...and this week we're pleased to show off a fresh new look for Google Calendar.


If you use Tasks in Calendar, you'll discover another change: we've removed the old Tasks link. Now to turn Tasks on and off, just click the Tasks calendar in your calendar list. If you only want to see tasks with due dates — the ones above your calendar — you can hide the task list by clicking the tall blue bar that separates the calendar from the task list.

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Insert a calendar invitation

Posted by Oana Florescu, Software Engineer

Since my friends share their schedules with me in Google Calendar, when I want to see a movie with them, I can check to see which nights they're free before sending out an email about it. However, I need to switch between Gmail and Calendar in order to check their availability and send an email invitation.

Today, we're launching a new feature that brings tighter integration between Gmail and Calendar, making it easier to create Calendar events from within Gmail. When you compose an email message, there's now an "Insert: Invitation" link right under the subject line.


When you click it, a small window appears that displays your availability as well as that of the people you're emailing provided you have permission to see their calendars.


You can check your friends' availability and choose an appropriate time for the event you're setting up right from there. When you've settled on the details of the event, click the "Insert Invitation" button and a preview of the invitation will appear in your email message:


When you send the email, the event gets added to your calendar as well as to your friends' calendars.

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Smart Rescheduler in Google Calendar Labs

Posted by David Marmaros, Software Engineer

As you can imagine, those of us on the Google Calendar team spend a lot of time thinking about scheduling. We regularly talk to people who schedule and reschedule a lot of meetings: administrative assistants. Talking to them, we understand just how much time they spend looking at schedules, investigating other people's calendars, finding replacement conference rooms and rescheduling conflicts. And then some manager's travel plans change and everything starts over again.

If you're searching for something on the web, you don't just start randomly visiting pages looking for relevant content, you use a search engine. So we decided to apply some of Google's search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times.

Today we're launching the result of that experiment, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in Google Calendar Labs. Once you turn it on, just select an event you'd like to reschedule, then click "Find a new time...":

You'll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated — no Google employees are doing any work behind the scenes. You can refine the results by marking people as optional, changing the meeting duration, ignoring certain conflicts, or specifying the earliest and latest times you'll accept. The results will immediately update to reflect your new requirements.


This feature is still experimental, so we'd love your ideas and feedback. Of course, we can't make meetings more interesting, but we can try to save you frustration leading up to them.

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3 new Calendar Labs

Posted by Grace Kwak, Product Manager

Today, we're happy to announce three new features in Calendar Labs. To try them out, just go to the Labs tab under Calendar Settings.

1. Event flair by Dave Marmaros
Want a little airplane icon next to information about your upcoming flight? Or stars next to meetings with your boss? This experiment lets you choose from forty different icons and add one to each Calendar event. Even better, if you invite people to your events, they'll be able to see the icon you added too. After you enable this feature, click on an event and look for the "Event flair" gadget to activate.





2. Gentle reminders by Sorin Mocanu
If you keep Google Calendar open all day long, you probably end up seeing quite a few reminders every day. Browser alerts are okay, but I tried to find a way for Calendar notifications to integrate smoothly with everything else.

Turn on "Gentle Reminders," and when you get a notification, the title of your Calendar window or tab will start blinking and the event details will stay in Calendar.



If you're using this lab in a supported browser (currently Google Chrome for Windows and Google Chrome beta for Linux), you'll also have the option to get your reminders in the next generation of floating desktop notifications:



After you enable this feature, you can configure notification options on the Settings page.

3. Automatically declining events by Lucia Fedorova and Miguel García
Have you ever checked your calendar and noticed that someone scheduled a really important meeting during your vacation or at a time when you're not available? Now there's a way to automatically decline events when you're not around. Turn on "Automatically declining events," block off times when you're unavailable, and event invitations during this period will get automatically declined.

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New in Calendar: Sports schedules and contacts' birthdays

Posted by Ian Whitfield, Software Engineering Intern

People keep track of lots of things in their Google Calendars — meetings, business trips, due dates and conference calls. But when I started my summer internship at Google, I wondered why it wasn't easier to add calendar events for the fun stuff in life, like birthdays and sports schedules.

Now, when you look under "Other Calendars," click "Add," then "Browse Interesting Calendars" (or use this link to the Calendar directory), you'll find calendars for hundreds of teams in dozens of sports leagues — everything from the National Football League to the Korean FA Cup.


When you subscribe to your favorite team's calendar, you'll see every game listed, updated in real time with the score as the game progresses.


You can also subscribe to a "Contacts' Birthdays and Events" calendar, which will add all of your contacts' birthdays to Google Calendar. Data is pulled from your Gmail contacts and your friends' Google profiles.

Finally, we also have two new Calendar Labs features for you to check out: "Dim future repeating events" makes recurring meetings more transparent over time, helping more important meetings pop out, and "Add any gadget by URL" gives you the flexibility put any gadget you'd like in your calendar.

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Tasks, now in Calendar too

Posted by Garry Boyer, Software Engineer

Ever since we launched Google Calendar, people in our forum have been pretty vocal about a missing piece -- an integrated task list. "To-do would be tooo-rific," "I really, really, really need to use a to-do list," and my favorite: "I'll join your team to help you get it done!" The rumble turned into a roar a few months ago when we launched Tasks in Gmail Labs. Now we've integrated Tasks into Google Calendar as well.


To get started, open Calendar and click on the "Tasks" link on the left hand side. You'll see the familiar task list you're used to using in Gmail, with some Calendar-specific additions:

• Tasks that have due dates will automatically appear on your calendar. To create a task with a due date in Calendar, click on an empty space in month view or the all-day section of week view, and be sure select the "Task" option.



• To attach a due date to an existing task, click the right-arrow from within the task list, and then click on the calendar icon.
• You can modify a task's due date by dragging it to a different date, just as you would with a regular calendar event.
• To mark a task completed from within Calendar, just click on the task's checkbox. (Isn't that satisfying, overachievers?)
• To keep track of due dates before they arrive, there's a nifty new "Sort by due date" feature available in the Actions menu at the bottom of your task list. While sorting by due date, you can reschedule a task by clicking on it in your list, then pressing control and the up or down arrow key.

While working to help bring this feature to you, I used it to keep track of my own tasks. Now I can finally check off the last one in that list: "write blog post." Phew.

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View Google Calendar offline

Posted by Ken Norton, Senior Product Manager

In addition to offline access to Gmail while you're traveling or without a strong internet connection, you can now see your Google Calendar events when you're disconnected. Offline Calendar lets you view your existing schedule and events, but not edit them, so you don't have to print out calendars the night before a trip. This feature has been available to businesses and schools using Google Apps for about a month; we're now turning it on for everyone.

Like Gmail, the offline feature of Calendar uses Gears, an open source browser extension that adds offline functionality directly to the browser.

To enable offline Calendar access, sign in to Google Calendar and look for the "Offline Beta" link in the upper right-hand corner of your account, next to your username. We've released this early and are still ironing out some kinks, so if you encounter any issues, be sure to let us know. If you access Calendar through the Premier or Education Editions of Google Apps, your domain administrator will first have to elect to turn on new features from the Domain Settings page of the Google Apps control panel.

There are multiple ways to see your calendar when you're away from your desk — in addition to offline mode, we offer two-way sync for iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices. So wherever you go, Google Calendar can be there with you.

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Get Calendar on your Google Desktop

Posted by Benjamin Schirmer, Software Engineer (and recent Google intern)

Following the release of the Gmail gadget, we now present a completely new version of the Google Calendar gadget for Google Desktop. If you want to easily keep track of your upcoming appointments right from your desktop, this new version has a cleaner interface, fully supports Google Apps calendars, and includes three different viewing modes:



Just click on an event to see details, including a map of the location, a list of attendees, and start and end times:



You can easily create new events as well, by clicking the "Add event" link:



The Calendar gadget runs with the latest Linux, Mac, and Windows releases of Google Desktop gadgets, so give it a try and tell us what you think!

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