iCal Family Sharing Best Practices

Question

iCal Family Sharing Best Practices

We are an all-Mac home: 1 iMac, 3 MacBooks, 4 iPhones, MobileMe Family Pack...
There are 4 of us, and we each use iCal. However, we each have private calendars, and some calendars we would like to share. For example, both of my kids have their individual school schedules and assignments, which I do not need to see, but they also have sports and activities schedules, which I would like to see. Similarly, I would like all 4 of us to view things like family vacations, etc.

What are some best practices in sharing calendars across a family? Should each family member have 1 or more calenders they publish out to the rest of us? Or, should I create a dummy "Family" MobileMe account to enter shared info?

MacBook, iMac Core 2 Duo 24", iBook G4, iMac FP, iMac DV SE, iMac Bondi Blue, Mac OS X (10.5.8), Airport Extreme/Express/AppleTV

Posted on Aug 7, 2009 3:01 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Oct 27, 2009 10:52 PM in response to Chuck Coulson1

I have the same problem. I'm trying to get my bride up to speed on MobileMe and a new iPhone, but we can't figure out how to share and synchronize our calendars, contacts, etc. She has a PC, so she can only access the MobileMe calendar. But the MobileMe calendar doesn't have a "share" option like iCal.

Reply

Answer 2

Oct 28, 2009 1:10 PM in response to Chuck Coulson1

Here's what my husband and I do.

I have several different calendars within iCal on my Mac - Home, Work, and a club we both belong to.

I have set all of these calendars to publish out to a free server - http://www.icalx.com You can create a free account and they give you the option to make the .ics/.html file private so it requires a password to subscribe to it.

In iCal, I have it set to publish updates automatically.

On my husband's Mac (and on every other Mac in the house), iCal subscribes to these three calendars (in addition to publishing out their own) and is set to auto-refresh (I set it to hourly, but really once a day is probably sufficient, and it does it on startup).

Similarly, my husband's calendar is shared out on icalx.com and I subscribe to it on my machine.

This probably isn't the most elegant way, but it works...

Note that this means that I can't edit any of his entries when viewed on my computer.

You could use this method so that that the kids just publish/share an "activities" calendar but not a "school assignment" calendar, and they can subscribe to the Family calendar that contains vacations, etc.

Hope this helps. Good luck!

Reply