shared calendar solution

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I've been struggling for a couple of days now with how to create a shared calendar that family members can use to coordinate care for my grandmother--especially while my mother, her primary caregiver, is out of town.

Google Calendar seemed like the best choice, so I created a new calendar under my primary Google account, which I could then share with others. The problem with that, however, is that I really need this calendar information to be available on my iPhone (which is my primary scheduling tool). GSync will allow you sync multiple Google calendars with your phone, but it can't co-exist with an Exchange account, so that wasn't an option.

Happily, the iPhone 3.0 software also supports the CalDAV protocol, and Google supports that protocol as well. But because Google calendar will only support your primary calendar via CalDAV--and not any additional calendars you create/share--I wasn't able to use CalDAV to access the shared calendar I'd created.

What I ended up doing was creating a new Google account specifically for this calendar sharing project, and then sharing the resulting calendar with my primary Google account so I could add/edit the content without having to log in and out of different accounts. Then I set my iPhone up to access the new account directly, so it could get the data out of the primary calendar.

Success!

For the rest of the family, I can simply share the new calendar with their Google accounts--or, if they have devices or software that can subscribe to a CalDAV calendar, I can give them login info directly.

It was a little harder to figure this out than I would have liked, but I have to say calendar sharing is a lot easier now than it was a few years ago. The fact that more and more software is using sharing standards like CalDAV is a huge step forward.

7 Comments

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If I understand you correctly, one cannot have an iPhone display your Google Calendar which is updatable from your iPhone and a shared family Calendar (on Google) that is read only. Do I understand this correctly?
Regards,
Jeff
CA/U.S. Mobile 1.631.482.5430
Mexico Cel 322.112.5622

If you use Gsync, you can synchronize with multiple Google calendars, so you could indeed have a personal calendar and a shared calendar.

What you can't do is use Gsync and Microsoft Exchange.

For those of us with Exchange calendars, the solution is to do a CALDAV subscription to the share google calendar, so that it doesn't interfere with our primary Exchange calendar.

Hope that's clearer :)

You can share a secondary Google calendar, using CalDAV and the Calendar ID of the shared calendar, available on the Calendar Settings page from within Google Calendar within the URL. I use this to Sync multiple Calendars on my Google account with my Iphone, no additional account required. Google Sync us not an option for me as I also sync my Exchange work diary on my iPhone already

Thanks, Clare! That's *really* helpful!

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