Thursday, December 16, 2010

Sharing Calendars in Windows Phone 7

My wife and I have two windows phones with separate windows live ids. We want to share calendars. This is especially important for us with all the doctors appointments that my son has.
The 1.0 version of Windows Phone 7 does not allow you to use the calendar sharing in either hotmail or live mail. I have confirmed this with Microsoft. (See calendar syncing). It also does not allow you to do calendar sharing with separate gmail accounts. You also cannot share a single hotmail calendar when you have two separate live ids. Google to the rescue. You can use a single gmail account and link it to two phones.

Here is the process:
1. Create a gmail account.
2. On both phones, in the windows phone settings add the gmail account. Under content to sync, unselect everything except Calendar.
3. On both phones, go to the calendar, click on the elipsis at the bottom and click on calendars. Disable the windows live calendar and make sure the google calendar is on.

That is it.

Enjoy.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the tip. Google is my primary and this works great.

Anonymous said...

have you heard of any workarounds to allow you to subscribe to public calendars? As in my kids' sports team calendars? They have ical feeds that I can add to my iPhone, but I can't get them to show up on the calendar in windows phone 7. I don't need to sync/update them, I just need to be able to see them and see any changes that are made by the team manager.

Greg Finzer said...

Nope, you cannot subscribe to public calenders in WP7 version 1.

Scott said...

iPhone show's all Windows Live shared calendar's, seamlessly, btw.

I sure hope Microsoft fixes this in Mango. What a pain in the ass.

Yury said...

Calendars should be shared not on the windows phone, but on the live accounts. Create a new calendar in your account, then share it to the other live account. You will see this calendar on your phone an owner. The other person will see it on her live account calendar once she accepts calendar sharing invitation.

Greg Finzer said...

Yes, this was fixed in Mango.