Windows Live Calendar Launches

Windows Live Calendar, a new service that replaces MSN Calendar, launched earlier this week in a public beta. The beta offers features like multiple color-coded calendars, shared calendars, email and text message alerts for appointments, and the ability to subscribe to a calendar's contents via RSS. Built with AJAX, the online calendar offers some desktop-app-like navigation features, including drag-and-drop, single-click to add an appointment, and scrolling through dates using a mouse wheel. Sharing your Windows Live Calendar is easy but has sophisticated rights management processes working on the back-end which let you share out as much or as little of your calendar as you want. You can let people see only free/busy info, you can give them read-only permissions to your appointments, or you can even give them read/write permissions to your calendar. Individual appointments can be set as private, too (click New to display the New Appointment box, then click "Add more details", and check the "Private" checkbox). If your friends don't have Windows Live IDs, you can send them a private link to view your calendar without needing them to sign in with a Live ID. Live Calendar supports the iCal standard, which means you can manually merge Windows Live Calendar with other iCal-based calendars. For example, you can import an Outlook 2007 calendar in this format.

However, one of the coolest things is the ability to automatically sync your Windows Live Calendar to Windows Calendar on Vista. If you're not using Outlook's calendar on your home PC running Vista, the built-in Windows Calendar may be what you're using for your personal appointments and family schedules. Since Windows Live Calendar allows you to share out your calendar in .ics format, you can then subscribe to your Windows Live calendar in Vista's Windows Calendar. This means that changes to your Live Calendar automatically get synced back to your PC in Windows Calendar. See a step-by-step video of how to do this here. (Thanks to the Vista blog for this last tip!)