If you are attending PDC 2008, you may have noticed that on the Sessions page, if you log in, you can chose the sessions you are interested in attending, along with a link so you can add it to your favorite calendar program. The only problem is that one of my favorite calendar programs (Google Calendar) will throw an parsing error if you try to import it. But, Outlook 2007 doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. So I have a solution, just use SyncMyCal. Scott Hanselman turned me onto this inexpensive tool, and I’ve got to say, it would be hard to live without it. One of my problems with the way that Outlook subscribes to calendar feeds is that it create a brand new calendar in Outlook, and there isn’t an easy way to merge them with you main calendar. So, what I do use SyncMyCal to handle the merges (plus I grant my family access to my Google Calendar, so they know what I’m up to).
So here is the setup, Outlook imports my PDC Session Calendar. I have SyncMyCal setup to push that calendar to my main Google Calendar. Then I have SyncMyCal merge my main Google Calendar with my main Outlook Calendar. If I wanted to, I could have sync’d the Outlook PDC Calendar to a new Google PDC Calendar, and then pull then merge that with my main Outlook Calendar, setting the category and even labeling them with a color, but I decided that was a little much.
Once that is done, then I can sync my Outlook calendar with my phone, and I’m all set. Got to love technology ;)