Publishing a Calendar Once you’ve painstakingly entered a bunch of appointments onto your calendar, it can make life a lot easier if you can share it with other people over the Internet. Enter a sports team or company agenda, travel arrangements for your whole family, birthdays for your entire family tree, whatever—and let the interested parties import them onto their own calendars. Begin by choosing ShareÆCompany Schedule (or whatever the name of the calendar category is). On the next screen, click “Share this calendar” (Figure 13-5). Now you have to decide how you want this calendar shared: •• With friends and family. Since this is a small, trusted group (right?), they’ll be allowed to see and edit your calendar. Click “Add people.” In the resulting dialog box, you can choose names from your address book or even type in email addresses of people who aren’t in it. Note: These people must be Windows Live members, and they’ll have to sign in to see your calendar.
At the bottom of the dialog box is a powerful but confusing pop-up menu. It lets you specify how much control these people have over your published calendar. “Coowner” means they have as much power as you do—they can add appointments, and they can also change the permissions settings that you’re making right now. (They can’t delete a calendar category or change your permissions.) The remaining options represent decreasing amounts of freedom. “View, edit, and delete items” gives people the ability to edit the appointments already on the calendar; “View details” means they can only see what’s on the calendar. The two remaining “View” options let people see fewer and fewer details about each appointment. Tip: You’ll be able to change these settings for each person individually after you click Add and return to the sharing screen.
Finally, click Add to return to the main Sharing screen. When you click Save, and then OK, your PC fires off emails to the people in question, notifying them that your calendar is now available and providing a link for them to see it. •• Send friends a view-only link to your calendar. This time, the recipients don’t have to be Windows Live members. On the other hand, they won’t be able to make any changes—they can only see your calendar. Note: When you click this “Send friend” option, or the next one (“Make your calendar public”), you have to click “Get your calendar links” (and confirm that you want to publish the calendar) before you can make any further decisions.