A.J. Brush

People often ask me about digital family calendaring because of my research. With the release of Windows Phone, I'm getting closer to digital family calendaring nirvana so I wanted to share how my family has setup our digital family calendar using Windows Live. At home, we use Windows Live Client and keep the calendar client up all the time on our main computer. At work, I access the calendar in Outlook through Outlook Connector and my husband Mike uses the browser. On the go, we use our Windows Phone 7's. This takes a little time to setup, but then it's easy to use. Note, that both Mike and I have a Personal Live ID which is our personal email account. Lastly, if you just want to import an existing Outlook calendar into Windows Phone 7, check out this article instead.

Step 1: Setup a Windows Live ID for your family.

The gory details about why I create a separate account are at the bottom of this page. For some people it works to create calendar in their personal email account and share it with their spouse, but we favor having a separate id.

1. Go to http://login.live.com and create a Live Id for your family. I will call this your Family Live ID. For example, my family uses thebrushfamily@<blah>.com. The calendar associated with this account with be your family calendar.
2. Login to www.hotmail.com using your Family Live ID.
3. Click on the Calendar option in the bottom left of the window and add your first event to your new calendar. See below for sharing this calendar to other Windows Live accounts.
4. Make sure you note down the password somewhere safe. Once you setup stuff you will login explicitly very rarely(maybe once a year when you setup something new).

All the rest of the steps are optional. Do all or some of them to enable the kinds of sharing that your family needs.

For Web Access: Share Family Calendar with your personal Hotmail email account.

You can always log in directly to the Family Live ID, but we like to have the calendar visible in our personal email accounts. I shared our Family Calendar to our personal email accounts and then turned off the default calendars so that when Mike added items to the calendar in his personal email account, he's adding to our family calendar.

1. Login to www.hotmail.com using your Family Live ID. (Or maybe you are still logged in from Step 1)
2. Find the "Share" drop down at the top and select "My Calendar"
3. Choose "Share this calendar"
4. Check "Share your calendar privately with family and friends"
5. Add the relevant Personal Live ID and choose how much they see. I use co-owner.
6. Click save which should send an email invite to the email addresses you added.
7. Now login into your Hotmail account and accept the invitation
8. If you only want to see your family calendar (this is good to make sure you only add events to the family calendar) click into the calendar view and make sure the family calendar is checked and then uncheck "My Calendar" for your personal account.
9. Repeat accepting the invitations and setting up what calendars to view for the other person(s) to whom you shared the family calendar.

For Home: Install Windows Live Essentials Client to display the calendar all the time.

Do this if you want to display the family calendar all the time on a computer. We use the calendar feature from the Windows Live Essentials Mail client to display our calendar on our home computer all the time.

1. Install from here: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials (you just need the mail client, but there are other cool applications you might want)
2. Open Windows Live Mail and configure it to use your Family Live ID
3. In the bottom left, click on "Calendar" to switch to the calendar. You should see the event you added. We like month view :-)

For Work: Install Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector

Do this if you want to access your family calendar through Outlook.

1. Install Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector
2. Set it up to use your Family Live ID
3. When you flip to the Calendar view you should see your family calendar listed.
4. Click the checkbox for the family calendar and you'll can see your family calendar either in overlay or side-by-side mode. Note, sometimes I have to "re-check" my family calendar when I come back to calendar view because it doesn't seem to always stay checked.

For Windows Phone 7:

Do this if you want to access your family calendar on your phone (trust me you do :-)). 

1. In Settings->email & accounts, first set-up your Personal Windows Live Id (which you probably already did when you setup the phone)
2. In Settings->email &accounts->add an account, add your Family Live ID
3. When the account is shown in the list, click on it to go to the options and  change the friendly name from the default (Windows Live 2 or something like that) to whatever you want (e.g. "Brush Family").

At this point you could stop, but I don't want to sync email from the Family Live ID and don't want to show the calendar from my Personal Live ID.

1. Turn off email alerts from your Family Live ID on home screen. We don't use the email associated with our Family ID (you could but we don't) so I turn it off.
   1. Settings -> email &accounts (in System menu) -> Account for your Family ID
   2. Under "content to sync", clear the checkboxes in front of email and contacts.
2. Turn off calendar from your Personal Live ID. I don't use the calendar in my Personal Live Id so I don't want it showing.
   1. Click on calendar live tile
   2. Click on the "…" at bottom right
   3. Click on "calendars"
   4. Turn off the calendar for personal live id (probably called Windows Live)
   5. This is also the place to change the color used for your calendar

Repeat on as many phones as you need :-).

WARNING - When you create an appointment make sure you are doing it on the right calendar. The calendar is easy to change during appointment creation and has a decent default. However, the first time it will likely default to your personal Windows Live Id which is not what you want -  look at the name of the calendar and color to be sure.

SUCCESS - you and others in your household can now view and add events to your family calendar at home, from Outlook, Windows Live and on your Windows phone!

Reasons I make a separate Family ID Account for our Family calendar:

Hotmail supports calendar sharing so you could setup a calendar in your personal email account and then share it (much like Step 2 describes) rather than making a separate Family Live ID.

We don't do this for a couple reasons:

1. Conceptually having a shared account feels to us like having a shared paper family calendar in the kitchen. This account belongs equally to both myself and my husband and is for our family.
2. With Windows Live Essentials we leave our Family Live ID logged in all the time at home to use the calendar. I don't want my personal email up all the time on the home computer (you might though) so I like having a separate account.
3. We also use this account for Live Messenger to do video calls with our extended  family. With a separate account we can keep it logged in and neither of us has to have our personal IM always logged in at home.
4. Although we have used this approach for years, it turns out to be a good pragmatic decision for use with Windows Phone 7. Currently only the default calendar of each account is synchronized, but you can have multiple accounts (so cool!).