I've been playing with various calendar systems, such as Mozilla calendar, Korganizer, Google Calendar, Chandler and a few others, and I'm finding them wanting. I have not used iCal or Outlook so perhaps they solve all my problems, but I doubt they do.

I see two ways to want to merge in additional calendars, neither of which is supported very well.

The first type of merger is an intmate one, for calendars in which I will attend most or all events. Effectively they are like extensions of my own calendar, in that I should be considered busy for any event in these calendars, unless I explicity say otherwise. One example would be a couple's calendar, for social events attended as a couple -- parties, weddings etc. Family calendars and workgroup calendars could also qualify.

The other class of calendar is a suggested calendar. These calendars are imported but I will be attending relatively few events from them. It's more I want to browse them. There are many such calendars now available on the calendar sharing services.

In a few of the tools you can copy an event from an imported calendar into your personal calendar, but after you do you now see two of the event. What you really want is a pointer to the imported event. Minor changes in the imported event should flow through into your final personal calendar. Changes in date or changes that cause a conflict should also flow through but be flagged as needing attention.

Tools like Google calendar, which allow you to access your calendar from remote locations (and easily publish public calendars) are good but they have privacy problems. As you may know if you read this blog, information on your own computer is protected by the 4th amendment. Information on somebody else's computer (like Google's) is not. As such, you would like to have any export of your personal calendar be encrypted, and accessible only while you are logged on with the password. Distilled, "free/busy" information may remain unencrypted for access even when you're not online. However, this is a hard engineering problem to get right -- in the long run we need the scope of the 4th amendment re-expanded so that "your papers" include not just your records stored at home, but your records stored on external servers.

Have I just not used enough tools? Do some calendars work this way that I haven't seen?