Plan ahead

Given that so many people use personal information managers such as Microsoft Outlook wouldn’t it be cool to be able to provide content over the Web that can be integrated into the Outlook calendar?

Well, a company named Trondent Development (https://www.trondent.com/) has done just that. Its product is called Infuzer and it works with more than just Outlook – it can add events to:

* ACT 2000 and v4.

* Lotus Notes r4.5/r4.6/r5/5 and 6.

* Palm Desktop Date Book.

* Outlook 2000/97/98 and XP (2002) running on Microsoft Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 and XP.

Infuzer needs either e-mail delivery of the calendar data or it can be added using either Internet Explorer or Netscape (Versions 4 and above) with cookies and JavaScript enabled.

Infuzer is a plug-in that is distributed as a small ‘Web deploy’ style installation (about 0.8M bytes) or as a standard downloadable executable (for users with strict firewalls, around 2M bytes).

Two good examples of the use of Infuzer are for weather reports and travel arrangements. Weather reports are already available for free courtesy of weather.com. Once you sign up for these reports they appear in your calendar automatically showing you the predictions for the next five days.

Better still, outdated reports are automatically purged from your calendar. The only complaint I have is that weather.com has put the entire report’s promotional messages in the subject of the calendar item which makes for a horribly cluttered display on a PDA when you sync your calendars.

Travel arrangements are a very interesting opportunity for the Infuzer service: As soon as the booking is complete it can be e-mailed to you or downloaded and it is there immediately in your schedule. Any changes can also be reflected automatically in your calendar.

There are other several calendaring services available on the Infuzer Web site including “Holidays and Festivals” and “Religious Holy Days” for 2003.

On the Infuzer Web site you can create events through a Web interface and load them into your own calendar by an HTTP download or have them e-mailed to multiple recipients. You can create all-day or regular events that can also span multiple days.

Trondent claims that Infuzer can be added to a Web site’s static Web pages and dynamically generated pages or embedded in e-mail in just a few hours. The simplicity is due to Infuzer just being a hyperlink and XML based ASP technology.

Infuzer is a very interesting concept and potentially a very powerful component for corporate calendaring.

Pricing for adding Infuzer to your Web applications was not available.