Office 2007: Many ways to share your calendar

Sharing your calendar with a co-worker is as easy as sending an email. Click the calendar tab in Outlook 2007 and select “Share my calendar…” an email-like window comes up allowing you to share calendars with co-workers. But what about sharing your calendar with friends and family members who don’t use Exchange Server or might not even be using Outlook at all? The new calendar sharing feature of Office 2007 has lots of options for easily sharing your calendar with anyone.

Outlook-to-email: Chris E. Avis posted the first of his Office 2007 Coolness series, and in this tip he shows how easy it is to send your calendar via email to anyone on any platform using any email client.

Outlook-to-Web: There’s another option that I picked up from Jeff Sandquist, who shares his calendar with his family. Simply click the calendar bar on the left side of Outlook 2007, then choose “Publish my calendar…” and step through the wizard. This publishes your calendar to Office Online, where you can select the people you want to make your calendar available to, or you can publish it publicly to the world (you as the publisher, and the individual viewers will need to use a Windows Live ID to view private calendars.)

Outlook-to-other: Jon Udell has good blog post about how he shared his Outlook calendar with other calendar services like Google Calendars.

Outlook Sync'ing: Scott Hanselman has a podcast that digs a little deeper into how to sync Outlook with a number of different services and providers. Be sure to check out his resource links including the very impressive Holy Grail of Synchronization.