Our family has suddenly gotten very, very busy. With school approaching, and soccer about to crank up for all three of our kids, my wife and I are wrestling with logistics. How are we going to keep straight all the practices and games, not to mention all the other school events and birthdays, or even *gasp* grown-up social events?

This struggle has sent me scrambling for a calendar solution for our family. I'm looking for an web-based or software solution that I can share across platforms (my oldest and I are mac, but my wife is PC). Something that doesn't create a lot of redundancy in data entry and something that offers some security and privacy.

My wife suggests a wall calendar and dry-erase pens, but I'm way too much of a geek for that.

I'm looking at Cozi, iCal and Google Calendar. Have you experimented with any of these? What works and what causes problems in your family?

We do not have nearly as busy a family as yours, but we use Google Calendar for EVERYTHING. We have one for activities and appointments, one for meal planning, one for local events that we are not necessarily signed up for, but if we're bored we can refer to. The thing that helps us best is that it's color coded!

We also have shared-calendar access to my neice's school calendar and a calendar at church, so sharing between households is another key for us.

We print the activities/appointments mixed with local happenings calendar once a month, and will print it again mid-month if things have changed significantly.

How do you get the local events calendar? Is this stuff you research? Or is it something that Google will populate for you?

Another vote for Google Calendar. My Mac and my wife's Mac can talk to each other, but her work laptop is a PC and she sometimes needs to be able to see the family calendar from that machine. Using Google also allows us to access the calendar from other people's computers should the need arise.

It syncs with iCal on our Macs, which is great.

We pick up the parent magazines from all of the local joints - we have to pick them up for both DC and Baltimore to get a good enough sample of things going on in our area as we are between the two. Our normal process is:

I flip through each mag and marks pages of interest
Wife flips through each mag and marks pages of interest
We go through it together and decide what we might have the faintest interest in and those are what we add to the "community events" calendar.

We rule out things that are too far away or "not worth the money" in the first pass pretty quickly. Since we are not actually adding things to our schedule, we tend to "overbook" the calendar so that we have options. (Soccer game if it's sunny, free movie if it's raining.)

It worked really well for us this summer while both my daughter and wife were home. Now that weekends will "count" again in our house for things like chores and such.

1. We use Google Calendar.

2. This requires that I have a google account. Since my wife and I do not want to share my google account, I set the permissions on our calendar such that she is an administrator on the family google calendar. She must now also have a google account and she must also have a web browser available.

3. End of Story. But not really.

4. I want to use my own calendar software that can sync with google calendar. This will allow me to use the calendar program on my iphone.

5. In order to get google calendar to talk to ical, i need to make the google calendar public, but this is not an option
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6. So I got http://spanningsync.com/ which, by the way, is an Austin company. The pricing scheme is great as it is associated with your google account and not with your machine, so you only pay once even if you are on multiple machines. It works well for my family. We also use it at work, and there are two keepers of the calendar at work, and for some reason it seems to be a little buggy at work.

7. iCal does a great job of handling our multiple calendars. At the same time I wish ical was more sophisticated. I want to be able to see a multiple week view, like the next five. I hate jumping from the end of the month to the beginning of the next month. Also, I wish they synced privately to google cal, or just synced period.

8. Next question: I use mobile me, and maybe it would be a solution. But it ain't broke right now.

So impressed. Really great idea, keeps you from falling into a rut with family activities.

Mobile me will allow you to publish iCal calendars on the web but there aren't security or password options, so that's a no-go for me.

And it looks like Google Calendar and Outlook do sync in the way that mac does not. Curses

So, Clay, without knowing much about Blackberry (do they run Outlook?), maybe your wife on the PC will have less issues with Google Cal than you, the Mac geek

www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answ...=en&answer=89955

this message was not sent from my iphone

Desktop calendar and planner software is a good choice http://www.eshasoft.com/calendar/

I got the following text from their website... "Desktop calendar presents a different calendar image each month, just as a conventional wall calendar does, but it offers you far more than that. You can customize and have your own monthly photos on it."


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Calendar / Planner Review: http://www.eshasoft.com/market/calendar-review.htm

For managing my busy life which is mostly busy because of my kids, I use BIEVO.

BIEVO allows you to easily synch all of your existing calendars into one central place. For example I put my sons Judo practice schedule into http BIEVO and from there It was pushed to my Black Berry Calendar and also to my Outlook Calendar so you only need to enter events once, all you ned to do is synch any existing calendar software it literally took my five mins to get everything perfectly synched.

It synchs with literally everything from all cell phone calendars and probably any big name calendar like google, thunderbird...

Even better about BIEVO is that my daughters soccer coach uses it, Her coach uploads the Team schedule to BIEVO then the coach invites me to follow the schedule and magically its all pushed to my Black Berry calendar and my outlook calendar. It is so easy and it makes allot of sense that someone finally invented software to do this automatically.

Thats just some of the features of BIEVO that I really liked.

******************** bit.ly/BIEVO *************************************