Dad started asking for suggestions (as it was his turn to organize) for events during this last Winter, and I was hit with a moment of realization. We could make our own common interest "Group" using the resources of our favorite web portal (MSN, Yahoo!, Google, etc.) to keep track of conversations, schedules, and anything else we might need. Most denizens of the web have become members at sites like these, usually looking for advise concerning life experience of some sort. I had been using Google Groups as a repository for our Vonage voicemail, until Vonage got better at distribution of voicemail alerts and Gmail started expanding their storage capabilities. Administering the Google Group, exposed me to a lot of features that I grew to love about Google's brand of group.
With this in mind, I suggested the idea to Dad, who fell in line with it right away. I set about making it all happen. I quickly realized some drawbacks to going Google. In order to become a member of a Google Group, one has to have a Google/Gmail account. This was no problem for me, but might not work so well for some of my relatives. Another bad part was that there wasn't any integration between Google Groups and Google Calendar (another favorite of mine that requires a Google account). With these two problems in mind, I set about finding the next best thing. That ended up being Yahoo! Groups. Yahoo has some very flexible posting and summary option, keeps things simple, and includes a calendar. Did I mention that you don't need to be a card-carrying Yahoo! Mail user either?
The only thing I didn't find acceptable about the Yahoo! solution was notification and presentation of the Calendaring resources. I decided to stick to it anyway, and construct a solution for myself to get the scheduling available on my phone in time for the week of fun in the Summer.
Well, the Yahoo! Group was a big hit, and my aunt started a companion group for sharing information and organizing events for a much larger chunk of family to meet up on occaision. Dad started laying out the weeks activities, filling in details when he could. We had plenty of discussions about it all, and it was very easy to use. There was no more worrying if we were sending all our email to the right addresses or not.My personal desire for access to the calendar from my cell phone drove me to sample options for importing and exporting the group calendar to other applications. From Yahoo! Mail, one can view group calendars alongside your own personal calendar, but you can't actually do anything with them until you bring them into your own calendar. After that, I was able to export the calendar to a CSV file, which could be imported into a Google Calendar I had set up for the same purpose. This went fairly smoothly, except for one event that didn't make it across by itself.
This was the point where I became glad to have stuck with Google for myself. I had attempted to print the week's agenda from Yahoo before this, and it just looked horrible. I tried out the same trick with Google's version, and not only did it come out very polished looking and informative-like, but I was given the option of saving it in PDF format. So I did that too, then uploaded it to the Yahoo! Group. I think that was the most useful thing I did for the whole event.I just finished checking some of the pictures from the big picnic, and I can't wait to see these folks again.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
