At TimeBridge, we have seen a surprising percent of beta sign-ups using Google Calendar. At last count Google users totalled 52% of non-Outlook users compared to 12% for Apple iCal which was next highest. (We expected Yahoo and MSN to be higher; they were only 6% and 4%, respectively.) Granted, we have all kinds of selection bias in our sign-ups. Certainly they are early adopters, which may be a sign of things to come.

I recently spoke with a friend who moved her design agency to Google Apps for your Domain. It turns out that the “killer app” for her was not Gmail, really, as she just POPs it to her AppleMail client. (Nor, I predict, would it be online word processing or spreadsheets or, even, wikis, if those were part of the offering today.) The killer app was Google Calendar and the ability to share calendars within the group. She’s almost giddy talking about it.

So what’s missing for her and in general? Scheduling tools, as Ismael insightfully points out in his review. As he puts it: “scheduling, as in making it easy for two or more parties to agree on a date, time, and place to meet. This problem is responsible for massive waste of time in the enterprise, and unless you standardize on a proprietery groupware system such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange, there is very little that can help today.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

And here’s the thing: any given online calendar or desktop calendar, for that matter, can’t fix this problem. As Ismael says, “the world is still waiting for a generic solution that could address such a common need once and for all.” We sure hope so. While Ismael, in the same sentence, dings TimeBridge for supporting only Outlook, I have a secret to share. We mean to support many more calendars. We want to be that “generic” solution. Our mission is to let users have access to our service indendent of which time-oriented database (aka Calendar) they choose and use. And we’re working on it right now.

Sometimes folks mistakenly think we’re an online calendar; we’re not that. Hats off to Ismael for really understanding what’s going on in this space of time. […]

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Best regards
 -Ismael

Cheers

Thanks for sharing.

I might create a synchronization tool family in the Office 2.0 Database.

Best regards
 -Ismael

Cheers

Give it a try, there is even a Free version. And it’s very easy to use.

-Cecilia
 OggSupport

Thanks for sharing, I definitely have to give it a try.

Best regards
 -Ismael

As well as Spanning Sync, you might like to take a look at GooSync. It’s a SyncML compliant synchronization server for Google Calendar.

Give it a try, it’s free.

Cheers
 -Chris