Free-Busy?

There have been a number of interesting suggestions on my post yesterday that attempt to solve the handheld-desktop sync and provide a web view of my calendars. However, many of these do not include editing via the web interface and none of them include a public free-busy only view1 for my work week that combines all my calendars.

The lack of free-busy baffles me – the data is all there and this has been in Exchange/Outlook for as long as I can remember. Yahoo! Calendar has this too if I remember correctly. Why isn’t this a view people have added to every web calendar interface.

Ethan does his BlackBerry to multiple-desktop sync solution using a hosted exchange account. Maybe that is the best option at this point2 – then the only missing piece of the puzzle is the public free-busy, which maybe I solve via some of my own code.

  1. Remember, I do not want to share the calendar events, just the free-busy status. [back]
  2. Assuming I’d have web outlook access. [back]