Google Calendar tests out new features in Labs
Just because Google recently (and finally) moved applications like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar out of beta testing doesn’t mean the company has lost its love for experimental new features. In fact, it’s taking the Labs concept, which it popularized in Gmail (and uses elsewhere too) into Google Calendar.
Google Calendar Labs is starting out with six features that users can add: Next Meeting, which shows how much time is left before your next meeting; Free or Busy to see show who is currently in meetings; World Clock for tracking different timezones; Background Image; Attach a Google Doc; and Jump to Date. As with Gmail Labs, we can expect more features to come — and not just from Google itself, since the company is releasing an application programming interface (API) that will allow external developers to build their own Calendar applications too.
Speaking of Gmail Labs, Google is graduating the email service’s to-do list, called Tasks, from Labs into a standard feature. Gmail only added Tasks back in December, and there are some older features still languishing in Labs, but the move matches my personal experience at least — along with Gmail’s offline access, the to-do list is probably the Labs feature I use most.
Meanwhile, Google continues its efforts to move large, enterprise-sized companies to Google Apps (which includes Gmail, Google Calendar, and other applications) with a new tool for IBM’s Lotus Notes that migrates email, calendar, and contacts from Notes to Google. The company has already been testing this out with some customers and has migrated 50,000 users total at Fairchild Semiconductor, Hamilton Beach, JohnsonDiversey, and Valeo. And in some of these cases, Chris Vander Mey, a senior product manager for Google Enterprise, told me there’s no way some of those companies would have switched to Apps without a Notes migration tool. Google says 17 percent of the business email market uses Notes.
This is the second move Google has made recently to ease the transition from other products to Google Apps (the first being the ability to sync Google Apps with Microsoft Outlook). Asked if he plans to develop similar tools for other email platforms, Vander Mey said he can’t get specific, but said, “There’s a lot of stuff that I’d like to see switched to the cloud, and I’m hoping that developers bring us many of those features really quickly. One of the things this Google Calendar [API] announcement should show is that we’re looking more and more to developers to do things that Google can’t.”
[image from Universal Pictures' film Back to the Future]
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About the Author, Anthony Ha
Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.