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It’s been a while since our church had a reliable church calendar, that is, a calendar that was published and subsequently updated. In the past I’ve not put the calendar on the web-site, because it quickly became out of date. This year, it seems that our calendar may be more reliable, but it was being put together in Word! I needed to fix that.

Since it was first released, I’ve been eyeing off Google Apps as an excellent suite of online applications for churches – combining hosted email and calendar into your own domain name. They have a free version for organisations. For US based organisations they offer a premium version for free – like any good US-based company, they haven’t worked that out for international organisations yet though.

Up until now, I hadn’t used Google Apps, because moving our email to Google Apps Gmail would break some other things. But, when the calendar was published, I saw an opportunity.

So, we now have a shared Google Calendar using our churches domain. The domain is really only important to those maintaining the calendar, as they can log in at calendar.toongabbieanglican.org.au. For members though, Google Calendar’s embed function allowed me to quickly drop a calendar into our web-site. You can then add this calendar to your own Google calendar, or I’ve provided a link for the iCal feed for other applications to use. (Sidenote: Does Outlook support iCal subscriptions yet?)

There’s some aspects of Google Apps that are disappointing.

• When I created a calendar that was shared for all the members of our organisation, it doesn’t show up in their calendar and there didn’t appear to be a way for them to easily just add it. Instead, I logged into each account and added the calendar using a long ID code.
• The print function for the Agenda view (the best way to view a calendar like this) only prints 10 days! So, I’m looking for a way to get the calendar printed out for distribution.
• Oh, and the print function appears in the embedded calendar viewable by the public, but it doesn’t allow you to print until you login – poor design by Google. The only way you can turn off the print button is to turn off other navigation features.

I guess we could have just signed up for a Google Account as a church, rather than the full Google Apps. We could have even just had one member of staff create a calendar in their own Google Calendar that they could share. But, staff change and Google Apps allows me to administer access.