Personae and calendars

In my previous blog I put forward the proposition that calendaring is going to be one of the leading web 2.0 services that will infiltrate the enterprise. To understand this position we need to look at our own lives. If you are like many people you have multiple distinct personae that reflect in different calendars that you manage. - You have a role at work - You have a personal life - You may be involved in voluntary activities - You may be your kid's chauffeur! All of these personae need to be brought together in order to manage your time effectively. But you also need a degree of separation. Do you want your employer being able to see your personal appointments? Do you want your work schedule cluttering up your family calendar. You will hear arguments that solutions are available now to synchronize calendars but these tools are still relatively rudimentary. The problem is that many of the tools have been built around products like Microsoft Outlook and it quickly becomes a real challenge to manage multiple Outlook calendars. Try asking a consultant that has an email account at a client site and one with his company. As a result I believe we will see pressure mount to integrate external calendar platforms with enterprise environments. This may well in turn lead to enterprises outsourcing their calendaring needs to external partners that can add real richness to the calendar. In the next blog we will address the reasons why calendaring is a great candidate to infiltrate the enterprise and provide web 2.0 capabilities.