Yahoo! Inc. has announced the availability of an all-new Yahoo! Calendar, a Web-based calendar service. Providing an intuitive, online social calendaring experience that enables people to be more productive, the new Yahoo! Calendar has already begun rolling out in beta.

 

Last year, Yahoo had acquired Zimbra (News - Alert), a provider of open source messaging and collaboration software that brought Ajax functionality to online calendars. Leveraging on this acquisition, the new Yahoo! Calendar is built on the Zimbra platform using the iCalendar (iCal) and CalDAV standards. Allowing users to share their calendar data with friends who use other online calendaring services and subscribe to any iCal-based public calendar, the new calendar is interoperable with other online calendar services including those from Mozilla, Apple (News - Alert), Microsoft, AOL and Google.

 

The new Yahoo! Calendar beta makes it easy for users to discover, share and keep track of events and appointments, which is based on open standards. Being one of the well known Web mail services in the world with more than 278 million users per month, Yahoo! provides its Calendar service as a popular feature within Yahoo! Mail.

 

With Yahoo Calendar, customers can keep track of activities through color-coding, drag and drop appointments for easy scheduling. They can also "zoom-in and -out" from a monthly "wall calendar" view to a single event from within a Yahoo! Mail account. Also, to create a visual, unique-looking online calendar with interesting photos, images from the Flickr photo community can be included.

 

The Yahoo! Calendar will include additional synching features and the capability to discover events of interest when the beta becomes generally available in the coming months. The Yahoo! Calendar beta is currently being rolled out in five markets: the United States, Brazil, India, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.

 

“The Yahoo! Calendar beta is currently being rolled out in five markets: the United States, Brazil, India, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. “We're executing against our vision of a smarter inbox, and this is just a preview of what's to come in terms of integrating other network properties into the Yahoo! Mail experience. In the coming months, users will see additional features in Yahoo! Calendar to help them discover and keep track of their favorite events -- like sports team schedules and concert dates -- and even more features to enhance their overall communications experience.”