Roadmap: iCal integration

We are really looking forward to this feature, and hope it will still be in the 2009 roadmap and doesn't slip to 2010.

We use google calendar internally, which we synch with iCal, so they are pretty interchangeable to us. As an example, I probably schedule 15 meetings a week. For each, I now need to do double data entry, entering this as a task in Intervals, then entering the time and marking it complete.

From our POV, it would be wonderful if appointments on our Google/iCal calendars could be quickly and easily imported as Intervals tasks and then simply marked complete.

Is that part of the functionality you're thinking about?

At your recommendation I have re-posted part of this discussion as a feature request. In it I suggested that perhaps the development team could share use case scenarios on this forum with your user community to get input, and in fact I'd like to share one of my own, to see if other users would find this type of scenario applicable in their work.

Mike is a project manager for a small software company. In addition to scheduling a variety of internal meetings, he holds status meetings with customers, and even participates in occasional sales meetings - most of which are by phone, and many of which employ Webex, GoToMeeting, or other web meeting technologies of the customers' choice.

Mike uses Google for his email and calendaring, though many of his customers use Outlook, and some of his creative staff use Mail and iCal on their Macs. He typically receives meeting requests via email, which allows him to accept the request from his inbox, and adds it to his calendar. He most often creates his own meeting requests from his calendar, which allows him to choose attendees from his address book and sends them a meeting request via email. Acceptances are tracked, and he can even see the free/busy time of certain colleagues. His email and calendar even integrate with Webex and GTM, so meetings scheduled in these apps appear in his calendar.

Meetings that Mike attends are part of the time that he needs to account for in Intervals. That's why he is so happy with the flexibility of the new Intervals integration.

* When Mike schedules a meeting or appointment in Outlook, iCal, or Google, he enters all the information as he has in the past, but in the description of the meeting he adds Client: ClientName Project: ProjectName. His meeting appears as a task in Intervals as well as a meeting on his calendar. Mike finds it especially convenient that he can skip the ClientName if ProjectName is unique, and that if he marks his own attendence as Tentative, this is reflected in the status of the intervals task.

* When Mike edits or deletes a meeting in his desktop calendaring app, he notices that these changes are reflected in Intervals, and when he creates a recurring appointment or meeting, he notices that a recurring task is created in Intervals (using Intervals wonderful new recurring task feature which was also released...).

* When Mike looks at his Intervals calendar, he sees some sync'd appointments that are not assigned, because he either didn't enter a project name or the name did not match the one in Intervals. Clicking the Reconcile Calendar link that appears in the top "action bar", he sees a list of sync'd appointments. Each appointment displays dropdowns for the client, project, status, and priority, along with default choices for each of these fields, so it's easy to clean up his sync'd items from one screen in just a few minutes.

* From Intervals, whenever Mike creates a task, he sees a Set Time link by the date field, similar to the Milestone link. When he clicks it, he is able to set a start and end time for the task. Since Mike has set his defaults to "Two Way Sync", this task is both recognized as an appointment by Intervals, and automatically sync'd back to Outlook, where it appears on his calendar. From there he can use his standard Outlook commands to change the appointment to a meeting by inviting others, though he usually would initiate the process from Outlook itself.

* Mike especially appreciates that though some of his staff use Outlook, some iCal, and some Google as their desktop calendaring app, the sync works equally well for all of them.

[Note that as this is a use case scenario (which is a term we use for the user experience), it does not include anything on the back end required to perform the synchronization, but simply focuses on how Mike would interact with the software.]

others thoughts?