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ISSUE
Currently sync at home PC. Boss now wants us to sync calendar at office. How do I keep my visits to grandmother and other personal dates off the office calendar, but still on the home calendar? Please help.

BACKGROUND
Home: PC, Lotus Organizer with EasySync conduit. Wife and I share home system.
Office: Mac, Now Contact with its new conduit. Office of 3 share calendar.

This is an important post!

A number of people have mentioned the same problem and the only thing I could think of is to use the private functions which will hide information on your desktop at work.

Does anyone have a better solution ?

The PIMs or C&S applications I've seen aren't PDA friendly and/or requires you to jump through some hoops on the PDA in a sharable environment.

In other words, if you need to keep something hidden from public view and you're using a sharable calendar, you'll have to mark your entry private (either on the PDA or in the calendar). I haven't seen a PIM or C&S solution that utilizes separate calendars *and* allows you to easily define which entries are public or private (there are many that uses separate calendars but it is a real PITA to flag which entries are public/private and more times than not, it royally fouls up the PDA view).

I haven't worked in an organization where my whereabouts absolutely had to be known by others. I've been in places where Lotus Notes and Organizer was used as a C&S solution. And been in offices where Exchange/Outlook was the calendar of choice. And I've been in one company where Meeting Maker was used as the company scheduler. They work well if you don't use a PDA but it's a pain when you do use one and you don't want anyone to know about your visits to Grandma ( and you don't want to start writing your appointments in a cryptic manner in your PDA and/or you have a number of non-private entries on your PDA before you first sync with your calendar).

In each case, I've either gone to a local copy of the calendar (if possible) or used the Palm Desktop-- and abandon the concept of "public calendar and scheduling". And if anyone needs to know where I am, I'll maintain a public calendar but only put on my regularly scheduled meetings. A trade-off.

With all of that said, I've seen a couple of web-based C&S solutions that might reduce the pain in one area (but introduce another pain). Yahoo! Calendar with TrueSync and WeSync. I'll leave it up to you to look those two services. A different approach (and with WeSync, a more focused approach towards PDA and multiple calendars) but it introduces new trade offs.


[This message has been edited by ProjectZero (edited 06-07-2000).]

Here is an example where a calendar app that doesn't share a database with that of the built-in calendar would save the day. I don't know of such a beast, but perhaps someone else does?

The lates datebook app (v4) is able to make appointments in category's. Maybe this is a solution?