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We have been using the Notes 8.5 beta for a while now and there are many new features. Many of them are aimed at the Domino Server and the Domino Designer client however one new feature for the Notes client is Federated Calendars.

Essentially this feature allows you to overlay additional calendars with your own. For example you might want to add some of your colleagues calendars or you might have an events calendar for your organisation. Well with Notes 8.5 you can simply select which calendars you want to overlay with your calendar. This works very well and I know we have had many clients asking for better ways to view other calendars within their own.

Another neat capability of the Federated Calendars is the ability to use iCalendar feed. An iCalendar Feed is a standard for calendar data exchange, very similar to RSS feeds. Essentially other products services that you might be using can publish a iCalendar feed that you can then subscribe to in your Lotus Notes calendar.

How to use Federated calendars and iCal Feeds?

On the left hand panel of your calendar go to Show Calendars and you can choose to Add a Calendar...



You choose a calendar to add and you have the option of using a user's calendar, Notes Teamroom Calendar, and even a Notes application Calendar. The ability to bring together disparate calendars is awesome. We have been able to look at shared calendars in the past and use Group Calendars to kind of compare different calendars but this is just seamless calendar overlays.

An example of how I am using this new feature is leveraging TripIT. TripIT is a new Web 2.0 type service that enables me to forward all my airline and accommodation bookings to it. When I email a booking to it the clever team at TripIT somehow automagically reads the itinerary and adds it to my TripIT Calendar. Now I can access my TripIT calendar directly via a web browser or via my Blackberry Bold's browser but I can also subscribe to an iCal feed.



So all I do is Add a Calendar, select an iCalendar Feed as the source, enter the URL to my TripIT feed, select a colour, and their you go. Your flights etc are automatically added to your calendar!!


So all I do now is email all my flights to TripIT, there secret sauce reads the document, and they add it to my calendar!

There are many great features coming in Notes 8.5. If you would like to find out more about this exciting release let us know and we would be happy to show them to you.