Of course, it's in the interests of exactly zero office software suppliers to make this happen. I suppose the ISO could consult and specify a data interchange format, but you can be sure that the implementations of the import/export processes would variably mangle the data.

I am reminded of a project in the MoD [1] to integrate a number of commercial off-the-shelf programs into a comprehensive project management suite, two of which (for reasons that will not become clear again any time soon) were Microsoft Project and (as I recall) a PM program from Artemis. We had to have a rule that managers would not export/import between the two, because the two programs fundamentally disagreed about how a calendar worked and what a task duration data point meant; a data round-trip between programs resulted in a project schedule that was irretrievably broken.

[1] Many years ago, now.

"Of course, it's in the interests of exactly zero office software suppliers to make this happen."

The solution, as ever, is to make it in their interest. All it would need would be a few large ITTs to specify open standards and working synchronisation across a few specified platforms.

Sortsa-kinda. Ok, not that reliably.

In my previous job I could actually do that. My "business" calendar could ingest stuff from my personal calendars. The only ("only"... yeah...) caveat is, that events can (and will) be duplicated, just like entries in your address books or "contacts" app- thingy. Especially recurring dates (birthdays) are prone to that. And don't get me started on traveling. We once almost missed a plane, because the flight info calendar entry was sent in the wrong time zone. One of my colleagues caught it, and we had to cancel the hotel downtown for the last night and book at the airport[+].

[+] actually I had a bit more time, I was on a later flight, and could spend some time at the Origami Museum at the Tokyo-Narita airport. I spent my last Yen on paper there, beautiful stuff.

Bollocks to all that nonsense - I still use a paper diary (using my own shorthand) and that's never wrong!

Until you lose the diary or it gets in a fire or the information gets stolen etc etc

Heh, you can say that about any device you carry around!

If you lose the device, you don't lose the data stored on the server.

What if the device is the server?

Then restore from backup.

You did make a backup didn't you?

Or were you waiting for the calendar reminder to do so? :)

IT's (sic) not "your" data - Google, Microsoft etc etc etc etc own the data and store it, you only worry about having access to it.

1. You no longer have access to it. This could be inconvenient, but if your memory is any good then the act of having written it down means you have probably remembered the important bits.

2. Someone else gains access to it. This is completely outside your control and could be highly dangerous for you. You open yourself to manipulation by scammers and advertisers, and anyone else who could use the data against you.

I am far more concerned about #2 than #1, therefore I like the OP use a paper diary, in my own illegible shorthand.

Works for me, and has since I was at Uni.

There are some things that computers just plain aren't good for.

"The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will being to think like computers." - a scary devil monastery sig.

Well I have got 6 calendars on my phone - personal, car club, work, holiday, magazine production and car info.

Add to that a walk planner for the important at a glance view

Then add in for my contract outlook calendar and yes it is a giant mess (all the personal ones I can keep control of)

Work especially as the client uses teams and slack and there is no way of syncing events with both.

As said there should be an industry standard (ics) but the implementations Vary a lot.

I don’t know what the answer is unless we go back to paper diaries…..

"I don’t know what the answer is unless we go back to paper diaries….."

Bring back the Filo-fax!!!

My last link to the 1980s*. Free-format, expandable capacity, never runs out of power. I still haven't found anything that works better for me in my personal life.

* I still give Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy a run out, but that's on an emulator on a very non-1980s machine.

I dunno. My Samsung calendar is synced with my Google account (for Android), which in turn is synced with the iPad's calendar. All ics files. Events added on one device will shortly show up on the other.

Maybe the complication is in trying to maintain multiple calendars?

Nowhere in the archaeological or historical record, however, is the madness recorded of two calendars installed side by side but showing different things.

AFAIK, The Orthodox Church in Russia continues to use the Julian Calendar when Russia switched to Gregorian calendar more than a century ago. So I guess popes have two calendars side by side on their desks, haven't they?

but which calendar is regarded as cardinal?

The one in the West transept?

So each app comes with its own calendar which of course is not the device OS standard one, is not integrated, and can't be synced but with its one mothership.

Software is no longer written to be useful. It is written to hoard data, and that require silos. Probably that's why Stonehenge was abandoned, priests started to try to track all users' lives....

Apple and to a degree even Google all since long adhere to open standards, but to add or remove calendar events data from a Microsoft platform (and I have't talked about the horror or other features like sharing, delegation and limited publication) requires - yes, you guessed it, money to license one of their idiotic and mostly broken standards, and woe betides anyone who reverse engineers it (as has happened before). Not only will that unleash a herd of sharks lawyers, but it also ensures that the next version will be "improved", which should be read as "tweaked just enough to make the competing product fail with errors" - or did you really think they changed thier approach that held back innovation back for decades?

The rest of the world uses caldav and frankly, any effort to improve or add features should land in that standard so that all but the shark pool benefit.

Dito for contacts, by the way. Carddav works, but could do with some framework features that allows identifiction of personal vs business data. If someone wishes to have their business data published so that every sales person can get to them and the occasional customer, that should not immediately expose personal details. Keeping that data away entirely is also (certainly at present) a good move, but why should the USER have to do all that protective work instead of the companies that want that data?

Sorry for digressing. Back on track: Open Standards matter. Anything else harms interoperability and should be banned from any enterprise on account of being in principle not that different from ransomware..

And yes, I just blew my rant quota for this week :).

Yeah? And what time would that be?

IMO the absolutely worst thing about the ms calendar is that when you create a meeting in it; the auto-generated generic emails sent to other (intended) participants contain NO human readable information; not the name/purpose, not the time, not the day. Nothing. Not in the mail Subject field, not in the email body, not even lurking half-hidden in one of the urls.

And it's not even a potentially difficult "syncing calendars" problem!

.

Although no doubt other people have other worst things they hate more :-)

Agree.

This is especially bad, when you as Thunderbird-user receive an invite from M$ Outlook.

Oh how true. I run my own server - my Android phone connects to the calendar just fine; my Mac connects just fine; my (and my sister in law's) iPads connect just fine; everything connects just fine ... except ... 'kin Windows 10 on my wife's laptop. Will it connect to CalDAV or CardDAV, will it f***. There's a very very special place in my version of hell where I'd put the MS ******* responsible for this mess.

And for work I have to work on two different systems - both Windows. For security reasons, nothing talks to anything else so as the article describes it's a 'kin p.i.t.a. manually adding placeholders in one to match the other, and remembering to change them when an appointment changes. And that's quite apart from having to manually cross reference with my personal calendar to make sure I'm not triple booking myself (which is not helped by not being able to take my phone into the office on the few days I go in there).

My first experience of trying to synch calendars was with a Palm Pilot and Lotus Notes in about 1999 using a programme that might have been called AutoSync. It worked fine after a bit of setting up and I still remember my colleagues' amazement at the fact that I had my calendar, notes and Todo all on the PP. I certainly don't recollect synch being a pain, unlike my subsequent experiences of Outlook. I had a brief spell of running the Mac version of Outlook and trying to keep it in synch with Mac calendars on the same machine but the spell didn't last long and every week or so it would just duplicate every calendar entry when it synched. I gave up with it when rebuilding the Outlook database and Mac calendar was an almost daily task in an attempt to get it to synch properly. I've been native Mac for ages and the Mac calendar synchs OK with my work calendar on the server. The only problem is that very occasionally some clients can't process my invitations and vice-versa, but that's liveable with.

Many moons ago I used my Psion to sync to the shared Outlook calendar - until I was woken up at midnight with the alarm going off because of someone else's dentist appointment........

After that, never bothered again. I kept them separate, it did mean that I had to type in stuff twice - like my dentist appointments....

Sounds like a call to resurrect Lotus Organiser.

Google Calendar. I receive events for meeting in google mail, I add an alert for it via the Google web interface, it appears to succeed but when I open it to check it again, no alert. Not always, but often enough that I repeatedly missed months of meetings. Possibly down to some weird combination of macOS calendar integration and google, but after a few hours of trying every possible variation to work around it I had to admit defeat and set the macOS calender to make an alert for every event in the calender. This isn't ancient history either, it was a couple of months ago.

How could this be an issue? In 2021? A calendar literally has one job. I'll stop typing now, but my scream of rage will continue for a bit longer.

What continues to enrage me about Gcal reminders is the fact that you still can't get reminders about contacts' birthdays. They sync nicely into their own calendar that you can display in the interface, but I'll only find out about one in advance (or on the day, or possibly a few days later) if I happen to notice it in said interface.

People have been asking for this basic feature since Calendar was promoted to a "real" product, and the "solutions" range from the manual to the scripted — but all pretty much along the same lines, "copy the events one by one into your main calendar or a new calendar, then add reminders to those events". Meanwhile I believe Apple users laugh merrily. Hell, I think even Facebook can do it.

Never had issues creating alerts for other events but I don't really use it for meetings, so sounds like your issue might be related — perhaps something to do with them being "second-hand" events. It's unutterably daft.

I wouldn't say that alerting is part of a calendar's one job though — the one job is to record events. The basic extra things that can be achieved via electronic calendars however are invitations, integrations, viewing other people's calendars and alerting. Trouble is that if you these extra features don't work you may as well just have a paper calendar and remember to look at it every day.

I dunno about Apple. I've turned off Apple's "Birthday's" calendar because the alerts aren't customizeable and the max warning is 1 week before (at 0900 these days, which is better than at midnight like it used to be). A week's warning isn't enough time to buy a card and present and post to foreign parts. I copied birthdays into a new sidebar Calendar and I set the alerts as I want them.

Also, the birthday comes from the Contacts entry, so if you've got just the one Contact entry for, say, Aunty Morticia, Uncle Gomez and the kids you can only enter one birthday and the Calendar will list it as whatever you've titled the contact - like "The Addams Family 50th birthday".

As for Apple Contacts -- you really don't want to start me on that.

"Of course, it's in the interests of exactly zero office software suppliers to make this happen"

Depending on the meetings, this isn't a bug, it's a feature.

[1]What we really need is a new standard to unify all standard calendar formats!

[1] https://xkcd.com/927/

One of the best and most truthful xkcd comics

I think we've got to the stage where references like "XKCD 927" should be regarded as being as valid and de facto standard as "RFC 1149".

Yes, but ...

The problem isn't that we have 14 different standards, it's that we have one de-facto standard that everyone except MS uses - because to MS, a standard it doesn't control in order to prevent competition is something really bad. All we need is for that one bunch of ****ing ****s to support the existing standard that others already support - no new standard required.

As a standards geek, I worked for years on improving Internet calendaring standards, and it was the biggest failure in my standards career. Why? Two reasons, one technical, one technopolitical:

1. The ical standards permit infinitely recurring meetings, which have to be represented as rules rather than sets. Then, when exceptions to the rules occur, they have to be represented as exceptions, and it becomes way too complicated. If all repeating meetings were represented as finite sets (to be renewed, even automatically, every year or two) then the standards would be much simpler and there would be fewer problems.

2. Microsoft has shown absolutely zero interest in playing nice and making its calendars compatible with everyone else's. When the dominant player in office calendaring won't play nicely, interoperation is simply never going to happen.

This, in my opinion, is why governments should mandate and enforce open standards. It is in the interest of the consumer, overwhelmingly, but open standards are pretty much never in the interest of a company that holds a dominant/monopolist position.

The ical standards permit infinitely recurring meetings

I've worked at places where infinitely recurring meetings (complete with infinitely recurring subject discussions) are pretty much standard operational procedure.

open standards are pretty much never in the interest of a company that holds a dominant/monopolist position.

*cough*AMP*cough*

Unfortunately we've seen wha MS does when governments require compliance to open standards - they'll stuff the national standards bodies with shills to vote through a piss-poor pile of manure with a deliberately confusing name becomes an "open standard that no-one but MS can implement", where conformance (or lack of) is impossible to demonstrate, and which simply carries on the "Use MS or have everyone complaining about lack of compatibility" control over business computing. With Microsoft, it seems that when they use "open" in the title (as in Office Open XML for the 'open' standard), it's like when countries have "democratic" in their name - you take it as an indicator that it's anything but open or democratic.

Now, if governments added that the standards have to have a compliance verification tool available which is also open, and alternative implementations, then things would be different - MS would need to write a competing pile of manure in order to be able to tick the box.

Before we go around synchronising schedules, how about using a calendar with a sensible start date?

1st January does not correspond to any significant lunar/solar event. Starting the year at either the Winter solstice or the Sprint equinox is at least a significant solar event, and has built-in synchronisation, at least for those paying attention to the rising of the Sun.

the Sprint equinox

Someone's been overdoing Agile.

I'm fine with the Roman-traditional January 1 for my actual calendar.

But since businesses and governments can choose any date to start/end their fiscal year, when can I be allowed to choose a start date for my medical insurance? I hate that deductibles reset right at the sickest time of the year -- the dead of winter and transition to spring.

Let me set it for April 1 (or even the old Julian March 15). After the inevitable summer/fall hospital stuff my missus deals with every year, we'll have blown past deductibles and often hit out-of-pocket-maximum just in time to deal with those colds, flus, and bronchitis (or worse).

But, that will never happen, because money, and I'm sure the insurers are lobbying to keep that from changing.

US healthcare is great but also an absolute joke.

Winter solstice, so ... June 21? Er, no. It's like an American stating that "Windows 42 will drop in Fall 2042".

A date. A real and palpable date thanks very much. Not something that varies according to where you stand.

We would need to neuter all religions before we could develop a sensible calendar... anyway French Revolution tried it, and didn't go far. Probably because it was still some kind of religion on its own.

Use a good calendar app and stop complaining! Apps and services are 2 different things.

Teams (Exchange) calendar and Google calendar are only services. You can't expect them to play nicely together.

I don't have a problem managing both on my Mac stock Calendar app, for example.

I think you can expect them to play nicely together — you'll just be disappointed.

These efforts are encouraging, though it does seem the problem regresses at times.

https://calendarswamp.blogspot.com/2016/01/calconnect-web-site-relaunched.html

https://www.calconnect.org/

Cheers.

I have worked (in my spare time) on both calendar sync and contacts sync for many, many years. They are both really hard problems.

The main issue is that the standards (ICS, etc - and also all the proprietary ones) are interchange standards, not sync standards (mostly the difference is that they exchange data , not transactions ). That is only a problem because devices and implementations differ - the standards envisage perfect devices, with infinite storage and up to date software.

To take a simple example... you have a phone calendar and you sync it to a desktop calendar. Then, on the phone you change something and resync. When the update happens, which should win? Well, it is obvious, you say, the most recent data wins. What if you have made two different (not even conflicting) changes on the two systems (maybe you deleted an attendee on the desktop and changed the meeting text on the phone)? The phone data is more recent (we are exchanging data, not transactions) so it wins and the attendee deletion is lost.

The problem gets even worse when multiway sync is happening between several devices. In fact, in that case it is so bad it is, in practice, essential to regard one of your systems as the primary (and sync small changes from other devices with the primary often) - that doesn't stop the problem but at least makes it possible to understand what is happening!

Unfortunately, even if the protocols are extended to address this (such as, for example, giving every item of data its own modification time) there is a much more serious problem in reality... the participating devices are not equal: in capabilities, in features, in storage, in reliability or in bugs.

Simple example is a phone with a simple dialing list: it might only store names and phone numbers, and maybe only one home number and one work number. What happens if your desktop has 2 work numbers, 2 mobiles, 1 home number, 1 holiday home number, for the contact? In this case, most phones will select a couple of the numbers and just throw away the rest -- that is the most user friendly choice as, in practice, people want their contact sync to succeed and not generate errors because obscure data is not being stored. If you later make a change on the phone and sync back how does the desktop know whether these other numbers were deliberately removed or just never received?

Back when I was a main contributor for both GPE (a PDA suite for early smart devices) and OpenSync (a very powerful and sophisticated PDA sync which tried to solve the PDA sync problem properly) [I didn't create either but I did put time in trying to make both work!] we tried really hard to solve these problems. For example, we had the concept of a database of all the quirks of all the PDA implementations so we could say "ah, that phone only stores 2 home phone numbers so if it reports only two later don't assume the others had been deleted". It never worked. It was just too complicated (and it could only have worked if OpenSync was the primary and everything else synced with that and never with each other).

In practice, the best solution today is to have something you consider the primary (often a desktop system like Evolution, or a storage solution like Nextcloud) and make sure you sync devices frequently, and try to limit changes to the primary if possible.

" the madness recorded of two calendars installed side by side but showing different things "

This is not restricted to calendars (and calendars in two different and competing applications).

In my instance of Firefox, the progressive download time indicated in the top bar drop down and the one in the "show downloads" page differ dramatically in both absolute value and increment in the same application . They must use separate mechanisms that haven't been coordinated. (two different developers who didn't talk?). That would seem even less excusable.