If you have fiddled with exporting data from Tandem for Schools into Outlook 2003 or 2007 you may have run into some difficulties. If you are running Outlook 2003 one immediate drawback, whether you know it or not, is its inability to subscribe to an ical feed. This means that you provide the URL to an ical feed and your Outlook Calendar goes out at certain intervals to look for changes to events, then updates them for you.

This neat feature happens to be in the much improved Outlook 2007, however, if you are fortunate enough to have Outlook 2007 you may be just as unfortunate to have discovered this next issue. You can’t get events from an Outlook 2007 calendar subscription to sync with your phone. We can hope in the future that cellphone software can subscribe to calendar feeds but that just isn’t going to help us today.

Enter Remote Calendars, an open source Outlook add on for both Outlook 2003 and 2007. This clever little plugin will sync events from any ical feed directly into your personal calendar where it can then be synced with your phone. Download the free Remote Calendars plugin will save you time.

To learn more about the technical side of Tandem for Schools, check out our Support Forum.