Mark Brown's Blog

One of my favorite things about Linux and/or Ubuntu is that I get to use the email client Evolution . I'm not a fan of Microsoft Outlook at all, and Evolution is a perfect replacement for it. All the features but none of the Microsoft bull.

I've also found myself using Google's Calendar lately. My wife and I use it to keep track of when bills are due, when the kids' baseball or what ever sport practices are and to keep track of all the family and friends birthdays and such. My wife and I each have our own calendar, and share it with each other to keep up to date. Pretty neat how it works.

Now that I'm using Ubuntu at home almost exclusively I found myself not wanting to import or retype all those dates from Google Calendar. So, I got to looking around and found that you can publish your calendar in 3 formats. iCal, XML, and HTTP. I then started looking around in Evolution and found that you can add web calendars to the calendar views. So, here's what I did.

In Google Calendar, I went to "Manage Calendars", then clicked on my calendar and at the bottom of that page there are a couple sections. Calendar Address and Private Address.

The Calendar Address Section is only for appointments that are made public, but the Private Address is for everything on your calendar.

So, I clicked on the iCal button and it pops up a window with a URL in it. I copied that URL.

Then, in Evolution, I went to my Calendar, and in the upper lefthand pane of the window I right clicked and choose New Calendar.

That popped up a New Calendar window. For Type: I choose "On the Web", For name, just put something in there to distinguish which calendar it is, then under URL I pasted the URL that Google gave me. When I pasted it in the New Calendar window, I had to take the http:// section of the URL and make it webcal://, It should look something like this webcal//www.google.com/calendar../basic.ics.

Clicked Ok on that New Calendar Window, Restarted Evolution and there it was, my entire Google Calendar displayed in the Calendar in Evolution.

Pretty neat stuff.

Of course I couldn't leave well enough along, so I decided to try the same thing with Microsoft Outlook. I only worked on it for about 10 minutes, which is about how long it took me to set it up with Evolution, but I couldn't find a way to add web calendars to Outlook 2003. I'm not surprised...nor did I expect to be able to.  It the abilitiy is there, it's not nearly as intuitive to setup as Evolution was, and I didn't really want to spend the time digging thru help files and forums to figure it out.

Anyway, they may be old news to some of you, but hopefully it'll help someone else get just a bit more organized

 BTW, I read an article that a Windows version of Evolution has been released.  I haven't tried it yet, but hopefully it works as well as the Linux version.

Later,

Mark