Well, possibly not officially, but this link will let you login to Google Calendar, a reasonably sophisticated, quite slick Ajax-enabled web-based calendaring system (who’d have guessed). Here’s an interesting news bulletin covering the announcement.

Interesting that Google continues its rage against the MS machine. A few years ago, I couldn’t imagine depending on being online to use a service like this – POP email was necessary (IMAP was purposeless, web-based was tedious), and I relied (and continue to rely) on an Outlook Calendar. Now, though, I’m increasingly open to the possibility of reducing my reliance on MS based thick-client apps in favour of lighter online tools that don’t compromise the performance or reliability of my PC – which gets more unstable with each application I install, and as my email inbox creeps upwards of 700MB.

However: the calendaring function is definitely one where I think Google needs to think about MS integration. People at work regularly use Outlook invites to schedule meetings, and loads of third party software is designed to work with it. Google Calendar supports a one-off import (from a CSV file) of your Outlook Calendar, which is sub-optimal for ongoing, corporate, scheduling.

We’ll see… The app does seem to work well, but I sadly lack the time to bother with the novelty of duplicating my calendar just to see if it works better…