CalDAV & Google
Monday’s been syncing with Google Calendar since the beginning and it has done so through Google’s proprietary interface. While that method was great for starting out, the long term vision has always been towards open standards. I’m happy to announce that Monday now syncs to Google via the CalDAV standard protocol.
CalDAV is a protocol for calendar software to interoperate and synchronise events. It’s been around since 2003 and, for example, it’s what is being used behind the scenes when you set up your iPhone calendar app to sync with iCloud. CalDAV is a fairly big and complicated protocol, but supporting it has more than a few benefits for the long run:
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First, it opens Monday up to supporting a lot more calendaring features that were not available before.
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It allows syncing calendar data in its original format with nothing lost to translation.
A lot of other software, especially project managements, don’t have (open or not) standards for interoperability. Every time you move from one app or service to another you tend to lose some data due to incompatible data structures. With calendaring, this need not be the case. With CalDAV and its sister iCalendar standards, should you want to migrate to Monday Calendar exclusively, all of your data will be moved in its exact form. Should you wish to stop using Monday, it equally enables exporting data in a format another standards compliant calendar app can import. -
As CalDAV is an open standard, Monday can use the same capability to sync with other compatible servers. Expect to see support for Apple’s iCloud sometime in the future.
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Lastly, having the support for syncing with other services over CalDAV, Monday is close to also being a CalDAV server itself.
This means you’ll be able to sync any compatible app on any platform (Windows, Linux and Mac included) straight to Monday. If you’re used to your favorite calendar app on your Mac, let’s say, you can continue using that in parallel with Monday’s webapp getting the best of both worlds.
It was a lot of work building CalDAV support for Monday, but I believe supporting standards is definitely worth it. I’m excited to go forward with a solid calendaring foundation.