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Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and other groupware in the '90s showed the way on calendar sharing - but it's not just your colleagues that need to know where you are.

I'm a partner in a small financial services firm, where my colleagues and I are often out on visits to customers or other business development activities.

Our office manager, Irene, was frustrated when we switched away from Microsoft Exchange as our mail server a few years back. We migrated to Red Hat Linux, using Sendmail as the mail server, setting it up as an internet mail gateway to replace a POP3 polling solution with Exchange. This has led to reliable and fast e-mail connectivity over the seven years that we've been using the new mail system. Nonetheless, we lost the diary collaboration and synchronisation features of Exchange at the switch over - hence Irene's frustration.

I promised that I'd do something about this sudden loss of workgroup effectiveness, Irene is rightly frustrated about not being able to tell callers when I or my colleagues will be in the office next (certainly not beyond the next day or so, which is usually covered by "see you tomorrow/Wednesday/whatever morning"). I looked at Yahoo! Calendar and other web solutions, but gave up when it became clear that synchronisation with Outlook wasn't possible, or at least not easy.

Like most everyone else in the developed world, I'm aware of the growth of MySpace, Facebook and the other social networking sites. My state, at the start of this year, was that I'd looked at Plaxo (too complicated - but I hear they have a new, much better user interface now) and was a member of the ever-so worthy, but rather dull, Linkedin. Then my teenage daughters, one a Facebook fan and the other a MySpace fan, prevailed on me to create a profile in each. This was around the time that Facebook announced at its May developers' conference that it was opening up its system (API) to allow other developers to write applications that could interface with it.

In September MySpace announced that they too would open up their system to third party developers. Around that time, while looking at some of the 3,000+ applications in Facebook, I came across 30Boxes which offers a calendar sharing application. Best of all, having nosed around on the 30Boxes site, I discovered a tool to import Outlook Calendar entries (presently in beta, pretty clunky, but it does work). I could see myself killing at least two birds with one stone - Irene could have access to my calendar through the 30Boxes web interface and my daughters would be able to see it through my Facebook or MySpace profiles (30Boxes having integrated with the MySpace API as well) - so they could could save themselves the bother of the fruitless "Dad - can u pick me up from skool asap!" texts of the past.

Everyone's pretty happy about the system - they can all see my diary and in the way that suits each of them best. One question and one gripe remain. The question is "how does anyone make any money (30Boxes, Facebook or MySpace) out of meeting my calendar sharing needs?" The gripe is that I have a Nokia N95 (Nokia's superior answer to the iPhone - in functionality if not aesthetics) which has a calendar application that synchronises automatically with Outlook whenever the phone is in Bluetooth range of my laptop (cool and really convenient, eh!) When web applications can do that - and the widgets to make it possible are just appearing - then Irene, the girls and I will be truly happy about calendar sharing.

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