Windows Vista Security: Praxisorientierte Sicherheit für Profis

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Chapter 16: Using Windows Mail, Calendars, and Contacts

Synchronizing Google Calendar with Windows Calendar

You can subscribe to Yahoo! and Google calendars, too. For Google, the steps you

use should be similar to the following:

1. In Internet Explorer, browse to the Google calendar to which you want to sub-

scribe, and log on.

2. At the main menu, select Manage Calendars in the lower-lefthand corner.

3. Under Sharing, click on “Share this calendar.” Although there are a lot of shar-

ing options, let’s focus on what we need to get this Google calendar published

and subscribed to in Windows Calendar. Be careful of what you select for the

“Share with everyone” option. If you select “Share all information,” everyone

that has access to the shared calendar (including Internet search engines) can see

all the details.

4. After you select the sharing options for this calendar, click Save.

5. On the main menu, click Manage Calendars in the lower-left pane.

6. When you click “Calendar details,” you’ll see several different calendar formats

next to the calendar address. You should be interested in only iCalendar for

now. Right-click on iCalendar under “Calendar address,” and then click “Copy

shortcut.” This is the shortcut you use to synchronize your Google Calendar

with Windows Calendar (or another iCalendar-enabled calendar).

7. In Windows Calendar, click Subscribe on the toolbar. This opens the Subscribe

to a Calendar Wizard.

8. Click in the “Calendar to subscribe to” text box and then press Ctrl-V to paste in

the web address of your Google calendar. Click Next.

9. On the “Calendar subscription settings” page, set the subscription options as

discussed previously and then click Finish.

Because web interfaces tend to change more frequently than program interfaces, I

won’t repeat the example for Yahoo!. However, you’ll use a similar procedure to

share your Yahoo! calendar so that you can subscribe to it in Windows Calendar.

Scheduling Appointments and Meetings

Windows Calendar can help you track appointments for yourself and any calendars to

which you’ve subscribed. All appointments can have a title and location associated

with them. On the master calendar, the title is shown first, followed by the location in

parentheses. When you create an appointment, you can specify start and end times or

you can specify that an appointment lasts all day. Windows Calendar also allows you

to specify whether appointments are recurring and to add reminders to appointments

so that you are notified a specified amount of time prior to an appointment.

Using Windows Calendar

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Because a meeting is essentially an appointment with invited participants, Windows

Calendar doesn’t try to distinguish between the two. This is why you can also list

and invite attendees to scheduled appointments based on your configured contacts

and contact groups. Invitations are sent by email to attendees.

Windows Calendar is not unique in the fact that it doesn’t try to dis-

tinguish between appointments and meetings; most calendaring and

scheduling programs do not. This is because with both appointments

and meetings, you must be somewhere at a particular time to meet

someone or do something, and programmatically it doesn’t make

sense to create separate sets of features that do essentially the same

thing.

You can create an appointment by following these steps:

1. In Windows Calendar, select the calendar you want to work with in the Naviga-

tion Pane.

2. In the Navigation Pane, use the Date options to navigate to the month, day, and

year of the appointment.

3. In the main window, right-click the date and time the appointment starts, and

then select New Appointment.

4. If the Details view is hidden, press Ctrl-D to display it, as shown in Figure 16-23.

Figure 16-23. Creating your appointment