SHARING A CALENDAR BETWEEN ACCOUNTS

It's been a frequent complaint that different MobileMe users, such as those on a Family Pack, cannot sync and contribute to each other's iCal calendars, or have a common calendar. There is no way of doing this, but here is a partial workaround.

Let's consider two people, yourself and you partner. Each of you has a Mac and a calendar in iCal (keep it to one calendar). On your Mac, in iCal Choose menu Calendar>Publish (turn on 'Publish changes automatically). When you publish (to a web page) you will be given a URL - note it down and tell your partner. They do the same thing.

Each of you now goes to menu Calendar>Subscribe and enters the other's Calendar's URL.

Each can now see both their own calendar and the other's in iCal; however you will not be able to edit your partner's calendar and vice versa. Your calendar will of course be on the web for anyone to see, though they would have to know the URL - if you were going on holiday for a fortnight this might constitute a security risk. (So far you will notice that this process does not actually involve MobileMe.) You can of course extend this procedure to additional users, subscribing to a calendar for each one.

As of the introduction of the 3.0 update, the iPhone can also subscribe to calendars, so again you can see another person's calendar and the changes will be updated automatically: this Tech Note descibes how to do this.

The MobileMe page at http://me.com/calendar does not, however show synced calendars, so if you want to access the calendars here there is a slightly messy workaround: export your subscribed calendar in iCal (select it, then File>Export): this will produce an .ics file at the location on your computer which you have selected.

Double-click this .ics file and when prompted by iCal, choose to create a new calendar. This will create it as new calendar which will sync with MobileMe. Of course both versions of the calendar - the exported one and the imported one - will show on your computer, but you can uncheck one of them. However when the subscribed calendar changes you will have to delete the imported version, and do the export and import process again before it can be synced to MobileMe.

This web page describes a more complex way of attacking the 'syncing subscribed calendars' problem: I haven't tried it but it has been reported on the Apple Forum as working satisfactorily.