Availion runs a service to help you share your availability information - not your calendar - with others.  This is quite a powerful concept because its often more appropriate for others to know when you have time in your schedule rather than what you have in your schedule.  e.g. If I want to talk to two vendors about the same piece of work, if they can see each other’s meetings in my schedule they might focus on highlighting the other vendor’s weaknesses instead of addressing the request I’ve placed before them.

The service has quite a promising list of features and calendar support.  The key ones that caught my attention:

• Automatic - No Synchronization
• Email Your Availability
• Use With Multiple Calendars
• Supports Microsoft Outlook
• Supports Lotus Notes
• Supports Google Calendar
• Supports iCalendar

The two most compelling items on this list are Lotus Notes and Google Calendar.  This is the only tool I’ve found that states it supports publishing Lotus Notes free/busy information, and in the past Google Calendar has ignored any attempts to import internet free/busy information so I was curious whether it had resolved this issue.

The site provides only limited information about the product capabilities so I dived right in, signed up for a free account and downloaded the ~5Mb installer to try it out.

After installation I opened the program and saw a fairly basic looking calendaring application.  Stepping through the menu options I quickly came to the realisation this would be a proprietary service requiring others to download the GUI  if they wanted to see my availability.  Either that or I use the email facility to send snapshots of my schedule to others, which negates the "schedule meetings without my intervention" benefit that makes a free/busy service valuable in the first place.  Strike number one: I had been hoping for a service that would publish an ifb or vfb data file so calendar clients could directly lookup my availability when scheduling meetings without installing extra software.

Next I tried to add my Lotus Notes 6.5 calendar to the GUI.  Strike number 2: it didn’t matter whether I used the local replica or server options when adding my calendar, it always returned the same "unable to read availability from Lotus Notes" error.  If I shutdown the Notes client I saw a slightly different message telling me to make sure Notes was running, so I made sure the client was running and I had my File\Security\User Security "Don’t prompt for a password from other Notes-based programs (reduces security)" preference checked, but that didn’t help either.

Strike number 3?  The complete set of Lotus Notes configuration documentation is a single page with a few screenshots and scant commentary.  It describes only part of the configuration process and didn’t help with my particular situation.  No indication of Lotus Notes client versions supported.  Using the application’s help facility referred me back to the same page.  No general help information, FAQ or forum is available.  Any help with this problem requires me to talk to their support staff but strangely enough they have yet to respond to my request given its Sunday today.

This service promised a lot but failed to deliver.  Even if the Lotus Notes functionality had worked the proprietary nature of the service would have kept me looking for a better, more open option that didn’t require my clients to install yet another piece of software on their PCs.  My search for schedule synchronisation nirvana continues.

(Via CalendarReview)