Online group calendars - Getting there

When my better half has ideas for a particular day to go out (movies, opera, dinner, etc.), she is typically not aware of any travel plans of her road warrior husband. That's why I looked into synching my Outlook calendar with something online. The Calendars.net is ok for sharing a calendar across a group, but I would have needed to re-enter my Outlook appointments, so this was not an option. The Yahoo and the new Google calendaring offerings are quite a bit more advanced.

The Yahoo option required a quick installation of some Intellisync software that allows to connect (import, export, sync) all sorts of calendars (e.g. Outlook, Palm, Pocket PC, Lotus) with the online calendar at Yahoo. To test it, I opted to export a few of the past weeks. The program picks up all Outlook entries without a glitch and plugs them into the online Yahoo calendar. I authorized my wife's Yahoo account to view the calendar and that's it. So far so good, but the calendar user experience at Yahoo is rather cumbersome, however. I'm used to see a calendar in a matrix, a column per weekday and hourly slots on the vertical axis. Not possible in Yahoo. It's simply one long list of entries and not very intuitive. All entries have the same size, overlaps are not shown, which requires extensive reading to figure out appointments. Very uncool.

The Google experience is somewhat the opposite. The Ajax wizards (hey, Carl!) did an excellent job with their user interface, it behaves almost like a fat client, including drag-and-drop capabilities, and overlaps are shown, well, overlapping. Cool. The different views are more what I'd expect. But, this is still a beta version, which I learned when I tried to load my Outlook calendar into Google. For one, I have to export a CSV file from Outlook and upload it to the Google calendar, which isn't very convenient. However, the bigger problem is that Google doesn't like my CSV file and refuses to parse it. It helps to know the product manager behind Google calendar, and according to him, it has to do with date formats. In Germany, we separate dates with periods (29.4.2006), but Google expects slashes (29/4/2006). I guess, the international Google community still has to wait a few days, as the word from Mountain View is "We'll have it fixed next week." Happy to be beta tester.

None of the online calendars picked up the so called labels from Outlook. That's how I color-coded all the entries, which makes using the calendar so much easier. All travel is blue, calls are yellow, meetings are red, and so on. Shouldn't be difficult for Yahoo and Google to add that feature. However, what tops my wish list is an automatic synchronization. I'd like to have a little agent running in the Windows taskbar that runs a scheduled sync between Outlook and some Web service at Yahoo or Google, so I don't have to remember synchronizing.

So who wins? I have to say, Yahoo, because it just works. However, once the Google folks fixed the export/import issue, I'll rather choose them because of the better UI.