(Updated) Have you ever wanted to keep a number of Outlook calendars in sync, or perhaps share other peoples calendars?  Can't afford to run an Exchange server, then perhaps Google and SyncMyCal can offer a reasonable solution.

This has got to be one of the questions that I get asked quite a bit.  How can I share my Calendar between 2 computers?  Well there are loads of solutions, although applying them to the school situation can be difficult.

There are a number of options - the primary one would be to use a Microsoft Exchange server - then you can use the full features of outlook, such as share calendars, mail boxes, plus a whole bunch of other things.  Although Exchange can be a bit overkill just for a couple of machines.  Not to mention that the cost of maintaining an Exchange server could be quite high.

There web-based calendars which work particularly well.  All the mail free mail providers now have built-in calendar functions.  Yahoo, LiveMail (Hotmail) and Google all have calendars.  But the downside is that you need to have a full time internet connection - when you want that calendar on a PDA, then you will have problems.

So in my quest to find a perfect solution, I came across SyncMyCal.  This little application works as a plugin to Outlook and links into your free Google Calendar.  The Lite version can keep up to 7 days of calendar entries, although this is limited to 2 days either side of the day that you are on.

The best thing about it is that you can use the application to keep several machines in synch.  There is a down side though.  If you don't click the Sync button, then your calendar won't get updated to Google and vice versa.  It can also cause duplication of data, especially if you add an event to two different calendars.

I have been trialing SyncMyCal in a school the a few weeks now.  The school liked it so much that they have purchased licences for the full product.  At about £10 per user, that isn't bad - plus there is no maintenance costs in terms of setting up a machine, getting server licences and exchange CALS.

In the full product, it will synchronise your whole calendar.  You can setup as many calendars to sync as you like.  So in your Google Calendar, each teacher can have there own calendar, and SyncMyCal can be configured to download the calendars either into one single calendar, or you can have multiple calendars setup in Outlook.

Having multiple calendars also means that you can make use of the Google Calendar API that means that your Calendar events can be published onto your School website.  So there is another reason to use the Google Calendar.

So where can you get this amazing bit of software from?  Try www.syncmycal.com

UPDATE:  Google now have a free tool that will synchronise an Outlook 2003/2007 calendar with your Google Calendar.  It is real easy to use, but appears to have the limitation of only working with the newer versions of Outlook. 

Enjoy