Home Forums How does your partnership share a common calendar?

4 docs, 2 nurse practitioners. We have a calendar (Public Folder Calendar in MS Exchange) that lists who's on call, who's on vacation, who's at a remote office, when we have common or individual practice-related meetings. We can all see it on any web-enabled computer running Windows using Outlook Web Access. Those of us with Macs can't do it from within a browser, because OWA is feature-limited except in Internet Explorer (same problem exists for Windows users who prefer other browswers). Mac users can see the calendar from within Entourage 2008 EWS (I've not tried the born-crippled Mac Outlook 2011 yet).

We'd love to be able to see this calendar on our handhelds, but Exchange Activesync will only "push" an individual user's main calendar to mobile devices, and the only way to synchronize a common "Public Folder" calendar with an individual user's calendar is for the individual user to do it repetitively and manually.

Surely this is a common business need, but I cannot find a solution. Anyone here have any ideas?

(I should note that there are 3rd party additions to Exchange that run scripts to accomplish the local sync to each user's calendar so that ActiveSync can bring the data to mobile devices, but the pricing is very steep (many hundreds of dollars).

Thanks so much,
Jim Robertson

Maybe I haven't thought this through but:

Google Calendar
Yahoo
Microsoft Live
Sharepoint would be your best bet especially if you have SBS
Box.net

We use Google calendar, which we set as private, but then share with the other folks in the group that are collaborating with, so they can see from a web view our when/wheres.

Sync's to my DroidX "auto-magically"

Also makes it very easy to set an appointment, and immediately invite someone from your contact list.

If you went with a paid version of Google Apps, there are more features/collaboration to have.

As Wendell would say, did I mention that it's FREE?

Like Indy said.

Of course you can just have one practice calendar, or individuals can have their own "work" calendars that are shared (and private calendars that are not viewed within the group).

Also, if you Google "Internet calendars" you will find tons. Depending on whether you want to give up onsite email hosting, there are many online hosting including Microsoft's Cloud Exchange.

If you use online hosting, you will get SPAM and antivirus control right at that point plus archiving and shared contacts and calendars.

You may even get one that allows HIPAA email.

One of the hospitals we use has the same stupid Exchange calendar Activesync issues as described. Instead of syncing from Exchange, it is actually faster to manually enter my on-call dates into Google Calendar (which my practice uses across multiple users, devices and platforms). I wonder how many times Microsoft is going to have to be pummeled by Google before they wake up...or die.

This is me leaving Microsoft alone. I hear they just 'bought' Nokia; I wonder how that will go. Walk away Indy, walk away ....

I will say that with Google apps on my phone and dev machines, I forget how often I used to manually sync my Blackberry for years.

Thanks so much for all the replies. I probably want too much. One of the things I like about calendars in Outlook (and Mac Entourage) is that I can color-code types of events, so there are quick visual clues to the on-call schedule as opposed to meetings or vacations. I don't think Google Calendar (either the free or business subscription versions) support that.

Also, what I read about mobile sync indicates that Google Calendar uses Exchange Activesync to push data to the iPhone (there's apparently a more feature laden synchronization with Android devices, which certain would be expected...

Question that comes up there is, if ActiveSync will only move a user's primary calendar data to an iPhone, how can Google Calendar leverage the same synchronization utility to push a shared calendar to the mobile devices?

The trick with Google Calendar is for your practice to set up & subscribe to several private calendars. Each calendar can be color coded, and all can be displayed on a single page. For instance, my practice has several shared calendars: an on-call calendar (blue), a staff time-off calendar (orange), a physician time-off calendar (green), etc. In addition, many of us have a private calendar for personal appointments, kid events, etc., also displayed on the page.


Apple's Calendar program on the Mac & iPhone can sync directly with Google Calendar.

Like John said. Seeing the colors is an immediate tip-off. In the web view you can also show/hide other calendars that you have access to, so if I need to check a particular block of time, I can just show the other calendars to see if something will fit.

Even with calendars, by immediately sending an invite, the other people have to look at that time block and decide if it is really free, or they forgot to put something on their calendar.

You also control your notifications, so if they accepted you can get an SMS notification, or the attendee list in the event gets updated with responses.

So, then the issue is, for a multi-doc practice, can those multiple Google Calendars owned privately by the practice sync to several different handheld devices? Or is the method of delivering the information to handhelds sharing of the practice calendars to individual doctors' calendars, who then can synchronize the data that's shared into their personal Google calendars with their individual handhelds?

Thanks again

I think the Google Calendar link answers this best, but yes, you can sync any or all calendars with any computer or mobile device.

Each calendar can be dedicated for something different (ie: the on-call list, the staff assignment list, the vacation list, Dr. Jones' personal calendar, national holidays). When a user uses his device to log into Google Calendar, all the calendars to which that user is subscribed are displayed on a single time period (day, week or month) in different colors.

You can go to Wal-Mart and get the $9.95 paper versions. That is what we use, and I have the S.I. Playmate version. Plus, talk to Scott, and you can get your kid's ear's checked while you wait in line.

I will try to locate our calendar we used for call five years ago. It was free, and it basically WAS the website. It was quite awesome. Plus, it was nice as I was the webmaster, did all the work, understood it, and the other four were clueless.

But, it was really the best thing out there for a pure calendar. Didn't do anything fancy like sync to Smartphones. Maybe it does now.

Bert, say it ain't so! Suggesting a paper calendar? Your techie credentials could be pulled for that.

And what is your backup scheme for a Walmart calendar?

Web camera on his server films the office continuously. Walmart calendar is of course included. Images sent to server; RAID duplication in quadruplicate. This is then backed-up (deduplicated) by Jungle Disc and stored on servers around the globe. So it is a combination of duplication, quadruplication, and deduplication.
Also, I think a secretary copies it on the copier once a month.

Ah, but you forgot the OCR reader that converts it into ASCII and the custom program to then transfer the information from the ASCII into patient files within both AC and to Microsoft Outlook as a further backup.

These are then are backed up as above along to 15 other computers in his office house and car

Perhaps I missed a step ???

Close, but far from reality. We scan the calendar everyday to the server and use a $15,000 CDP (that would be Continuous Data Protection). At the end of the day, it is hand copied to a second calendar and checked by three other employees. It is then taken by Brinks to a bank, duplicated twice and then taken to two other banks one hour away in an undisclosed location.

It can't be converted into patient files as we use this for call schedules, etc. We don't use AC, but we do use Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint and Windows Live for further redundancy.

We do use Jungle Disk which backs it up using the process of deduplication (deduplication is a subset of backups). We decided NOT to use Jungle Disc as we don't know what that is, and when we checked with Amazon S3, they had no idea. They did direct us to Jungle Disk.

Bert, not to criticize your security procedures, but I think WikiLeaks posted a copy of your calendar just now on the internet.

My way is the simplest. I just call up the other docs and ask, "Who the Hell is on call? It damn well better not be me!!!"

lol, it always comes back to Walmart. Not only will they check the ear, but they would love to irrigate it as well!!!

I just use my iPhone. Occasionally I put something on the AC schedule, like a lunch date, that I think is relevant for the office. Just spent lunch with another doctor who wanted to discuss AC at length - a new user. I'm trying to convince her to get on the forum.

Of course, that's the beauty of it. You can get the calendar while you wear the pager.

@John, Yeah someone in the office leaked it to Wikileaks. I had to let them go. After they bought me a new one from K-mart.

Wendell, the step that you missed was the armed courier who takes daily full backups to secure refurbished Minute-Man Silo, and is stored behind two man control blast doors.

The only downside is that once the backups are contaminated with the on-site radiation, they can't be re-used.

Actually, they can be reused.

The electronic food chain in my house typically means that every time I update, the prior generation of device goes to my college-age son. (Sometimes it goes the other way; wise beyond his years, he left his PS3 at home with me along with a copy of Gran Turismo 5 when he transferred from the local JC to City University of New York).

If the "latest and greatest" is REALLY cool, there's no hand-me-down as far as my wife is concerned. Epocrates on the iPhone 3G was too slow, so I got an iPhone 4. You can bet she had one, too, as soon as ATT didn't want a second mortgage on our house for "early termination" on her own older iPhone.

However, having that "stuff" lying around allowed me to play with your suggestions yesterday, and I think I've convinced my office of the benefits of your Google Calendar solution. Thanks!

I have noticed a few curiosities. First, one of the calendars sometimes doesn't load after a change is made. It always comes back with a click on the "refresh" button. Will this be a frequent annoyance?

Second, pushing all the new events to the iPhone really eats battery. Looks as though once they're there, battery life returns to normal. Can I look forward to that?

Third, is there any way to make the color "tooltips" on the iPhone match those in Google Calendar?

By the way, I was puzzled by why Google could sync multiple calendars to the iPhone using Activesync while Exchange could only do the user's primary calendar, and there IS some of that here as well. Google can't sync all these calendars to Outlook, unless they're all exported to the Google calendar's primary calendar first; only the primary Google Calendar can be synchronized to a user's Outlook calendar. Not worth bothering with that, because the export of data from the "topical" calendars is one-way and permanent.