The big news of the day is … Google has released the much anticipated Google Calendar! Wow, Google has got online calendar, big deal, isn’t it? Yahoo and MSN has got one for ages, and what makes Google’s offering unique?
For one very obvious reason, Google lets you use iCal format to share your calendars. Woohoo… don’t worry, giving you the ability to share your calendars doesn’t mean you need to share them with the rest of the world! By default, all calendar events are private unless you want to make them public.
Now let’s make one of your calendars public so that we can access it via Sunbird. The Sunbird Project is Mozilla’s (the company behind the popular Firefox web browser) approach to produce a cross platform standalone calendar application based on Mozilla’s XUL user interface language. It’s free and currently in alpha stage. Nevertheless, you can still use it to access your Google Calendar.
And below is the howto.
First, click on “Manage calendars”. By default, a calendar after your name is created for you the first time you use Google Calendar. Now we want to share that calendar.
Next, click on “Share this calendar” to open the public/private setting page. Select the option “Share all information on this calendar”. Save the change.
Go and manage your calendar again. This time, click on the “ICAL” button. Copy the address displayed on screen.
Go to Mozilla Sunbird (download here). Open the Calendar pane, right click, and select New Calendar.
Select Remote calendar. Paste the address you copied just now into the address bar. Give your address a creative name and color.
You’re done! Currently you can only download your calendar events from Google Calendar to Sunbird (or any other iCal-based applications).
This works great, however, if you have non-standart characters like æ, ø and å (possibly others) Sunbirds gives an error, (something about UTF-8)
Does not work with recurrences…
No sync to mobile no cell notifications(yeah only US) its not fair. They sure can do better, more recently i tried zyb.com and it works!! syncs calendar and contacts to mobile and you can share ‘em plus its UI is as nice as google, free too. Looks better and works
You don’t need to make a Google calendar public in order to access it through Sunbird. Click the arrow next to the calendar you want to access, choose Calendar Settings. From here, head to the bottom of the page to where it says ‘private address’. Click it, and a pop up with the link will appear - right click and ‘copy link location’ (or similar, depending on your browser). Put that link in Sunbird instead. Now noone else should be able to rifle through your calendar, but you can access it with sunbird.
ok I have problems… which version of Sunbird did you use?
I tried it today with the latest release of Sunbird for windows: Sunbird 0.3 alpha2 and today’s version of Google calender. I noted that in your screenshot of the Google calender ’sharing settings’ it shows 2 buttons: XML and ICAL. The current version of Google calender however has a 3rth button: HTML
Also Sunbird 0.3 alpha2 asks for either ‘CalDAV’ or ‘WebDAV’. WebDAV results into an error, CalDAV results into.. nothingess. No calender is shown in Sunbird 0.3 alpha2
I am using Sunbird 0.3a2 german. The only chance to work
halfway is to use strictly english characters in Google Calendar (ascii). As soon as there is an Umlaut (e.g. ü) there will be an error message from the Parser.
Cheers and wait for Multilingual support.
I’m having the smae problem Rob, been doing it since i first tried a few months ago.
i have the same problem like rob & ashimema, it does not work under the latest version of Sunbird…
maybe we should try with the Thunderbird calendar extension…
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/
cheers,
m.
i’ve succeded in putting my google agenda on Sunbird… but not directly…
i had to save locally the ics file and the i’ve imported the ics into my sunbird calendar
cheers,
Autor, Respect!
Sunbird 03.a2 (most recent release) appears to be incompatible with Google Calendar. Please disregard this guide until the author updates it.
I’m having the same issue - Sunbird doesn’t display the Google Calendar under either WebDAV or CalDAV.
Does anyone have a real workable solution to integrating Sunbird w/ Google Calendar??
This guide works perfectly well with latest releases of Google Calendar and Sunbird.
As of 25 January 07 I have been integrating them properly for four days, as yet without difficulty. Google calendar prefs allow you to export as ICal, and the corresponding format when setting up Sunbird appears to be ICS.