Using multiple GMail/GCalendar accounts
Contents
Since last week we have switched our corporate emails from our ISP to Google Apps for Domains. This gives everybody very easy way how to access and share the Calendar and Contacts, provides Web interface that really works - as well as capability to access your emails via POP3. So far I am very happy with it and the feedback I have got from other Thinknostickers was positive (or none, which means everything is likely OK).
This also created interesting challenge for those of us, who were using GMail for personal emails and GCalendar to plan your life outside of the work. Solution was pretty simple: two browsers and correctly shared calendars.
The two browsers are must, because you cannot be logged on into two GMail accounts in one browser at the same time. The implementation was trivial: in addition to my default browser (Firefox, on both platforms), I can finally get some useful mileage out of the "secondary" browser (Internet Explorer or Safari). It is kinda funny that the secondary browser is actually native browser for each platform. But I did not mean secondary as something negative. Safari is excellent browser and IE7 is pretty neat too and quite fast - they just happen not to have so many cool plugins as Firefox.
So I've decided to keep using Firefox for personal GMail and start using IE7/Safari for gmail dot thinknostic dot com. Sharing calendars it is even more cool. In work account, I have shared my work calendar (named Miro Adamy) with whole team. In addition to that, I am sharing my work calendar with my personal gmail address and the sharing is "user can change calendar". With this setting, I am able to see all the events that are planned for my work calendar and compare / overlap it with personal calendar, I can also enter from Firefox events into both. I have also made the sharing the other way: I have allowed my personal calendar to be seen and modified by my work identity. This way I have free selection: either go to my "personal" browser and see my personal calendar (with calendars of family members) with my work calendar on top of that - or go to my work browser and see my work calendar (with calendars of my colegauages ) and my personal calendar. This way you can see overlaps between work and personal affairs in either environment - and the "context" calendars on top.
The only problem now is that the space in my personal calendar seems to be somehow very small and shrining recently. But there is nothing Google can do about this :-(
Author Miro Adamy
LastMod 2007-02-01
License (c) 2006-2020 Miro Adamy