Sweet Interoperable Goodness

I've expounded before about my interest in Google Calendar, and how useful I find it (probably to a level that borders on fanboy). So, when I went to setup the next installment of the CRAPT (our occasional rotating poker game), I knew I wanted to involve calendar.

I started with an old invite in my Gmail account, so that I could just copy and paste for the new event. Then, I clicked the "Add Event Info" link in Gmail. However, it didn't allow me to enter everything I needed, so I clicked the additional options button and ended up on a calendar event form instead. I found all of this a bit confusing, and it took me a couple of times before I had it right. Next time, I will cut out the middle man, and just start in Google Calendar.

Once it was all done though, I was pretty happy with the result. I had the list of all invitees in the event for all to see, and I could now sit back and receive accepted or declined invitations, and see updated status on my calendar.

However, I was truly amazed at how well this all worked with Microsoft Outlook. I have quit using Outlook except at work, however my wife still uses it. I had sent her an invitation partly to get her on the list, and partly to see how an invite looked in something other than Gmail. Here is how the invitation looked to her in Outlook:

Note a couple of things of interest. First, you'll see that upon accepting the invitation it correctly got added to her calendar. Simple sure, but I was still amazed. Of course, once it was in the calendar, it could be treated like any other Outlook calendar event, forwarded on (as in the screenshot) and so forth.

The thing that really blew my mind though was that she didn't even have to click the yes/no/maybe hyperlinks at the bottom. The actual Outlook Accept/Decline buttons correctly added it to the calendar, updated the Google Calendar and notified me by email.

All in all, score one finally for interoperability. I expected this out of something like iCal, which uses the iCalendar format natively, but not out of Outlook. Very promising.