Calendars - The Trojan Horse for Enterprise 2.0

I believe that Web 2.0 Calendar applications represent a tremendous opportunity to infiltrate the enterprise with Web 2.0 style applications. In our busy lives juggling time and responsibilities between our personal and working lives is an ongoing challenge for many people. I would argue that for many people that use electronic schedulers the primary calendar is the work calendar that exists on a company provided computer and synchronized with a company server. However, the threat of liability litigation has increased the active oversight that companies take with employee email-related information and calendars are intimately linked with email. This raises the question of privacy. Do we as individuals want our employers to be able to delve in to the details of our daily lives - both inside and outside work. The use of smartphones (aka crackberries) is only serving to force this issue to a head. I believe that there will be a growing desire by individuals to take control of their schedules. This will likely take the form of a web-based calendar, actually multiple calendars, with increasingly tight integration with mobile phones. Our work schedules will become an adjunct to our personal calendars. With an increasing dependence upon Web 2.0 style calendars we will see these applications evolve with sophisticated mash-ups driven by the content of our schedule. Think of it - Directions to take us from one appointment to another. Recommendations for restaurants in the vicinity for lunch or dinner time. Hotel reservations. I am positive that this enrichment will happen because of one of the major concerns raised as a barrier to Enterprise Web 2.0 is the lack of time we have to do more than our job. As such the solutions that simplify our hectic schedules will be more successful. As I sit here and manually re-key a schedule for Little League Baseball games in to my Entourage calendar I become more convinced that the adoption of web 2.0 calendars is inevitable. Who's with me?