Thank you Google, you made my day!

I seldom get excited over new feature releases - unless I can see that they will make my life easier; simplifying interaction, providing easier access, avoiding duplicate work, and so on. The reason is that I usually want less, not more. And new features usually mean more things to learn or keep away from. The benefit has to be really clear.

This week has contained news about some new features in applications I use and which I actually look forward to get.

Microsoft has released Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition 2.0. I hope it will make blogging within MOSS easier and more powerful since MOSS suffers from severe limitations when it comes to blogging and RSS. New features in the Community Kit are custom RSS links, trackbacks / linkbacks, post trimming, SEO Friendly URL's and tag clouds. I hope my company will implement this kit and that it will live up to my (not so high) expectations. One small step for man, but a giant step for MOSS 2007.

But what I am really excited about is the fact that Google just released “Google Calendar Sync”, an application for two-way sync between Google Calendar and Outlook. The value of this feature is obvious. I tried to achieve the same thing with an unreliable third party tool some time ago, but it was unreliable in the sense that it erased all events in my outlook calendar (!). My first action after that was to uninstall it and accept to live with two separate calendars. One calendar instead of two is what the promise is from the Google calendar team. I use Google calendar for planning all the family-related activities together with my wife and Outlook planning work-related activities. My expectation is that these two worlds can have a happier marriage with less conflicts and misunderstandings.