Happy Holidays! I am going to start by admitting that I need to be to a Christmas party in 40 minutes and I have to pick up a cheesecake on the way so this is going to be quick.

I have a client who needs a calendar on their web site. They may want to let lots of people add events to this calendar; they may want to deputize a select few to add events. They want to do this inexpensively. They don’t want to give up all control. They expect to have a lot of events added.

I’ve been looking all afternoon for a solution – until I ran into my old friend Google. They have a new-ish calendar application (http://www.google.com/calendar). So I created a quick calendar to test on my site (http://www.treacyinfo.com/calendar.htm). I haven’t spent a ton of time on it – but for less than 10 minutes of work, it’s not bad. As you can see you can browse through my events. If I gave you permission you could add an event from the backend (a Google page). I’m not sure yet if I could give free reign for strangers to add events – I don’t think so.

It looks a lot like Outlook, which is good since most people know Outlook. It is very easy to set up and browse. A very nice added attraction is that if you add a street address to as an event detail then users can easily link to direction and more info to the event on Google maps. That might be the seller for my client.