RSVP
For years, I've had this convoluted half-electronic, half-manual mechanism for managing RSVP's for parties. We have six or seven fairly big parties a year, big enough that it's worth tracking how many people come so we know if have enough food or need to call ahead to the restaurant. Usually, I'd use email to send the invitations and either use my Palm Memo Pad or a spreadsheet (ugh!) to maintain the final tally. Recently, friends have been urging me to use one of the Web-based RSVP programs, but I just didn't see the point. Until now, that is.

MyPalm has a nice RSVP tool that lets you create a Web-based invitation to send to email addresses in your contact list. Once you send the invitation, MyPalm adds the event to your calendar (synchronizing it to your Palm handheld, of course) and, as people reply via the RSVP form, it maintains a list of the people who have replied. At any time, you can check the RSVP list to see an accurate count of who will attend the event.

The RSVP tool can include text and numeric questions, such as the number of guests an invitee will bring or any dietary constraints an invitee has, in addition to an image and details of the event.

A nice touch is that you can look at all your pending or past RSVPs and see the status of a specific RSVP, or you can open an RSVP and obtain the information about a specific invitee. If you think this is overkill, consider the harried office administrator responsible for managing office parties on behalf of a large group!

You can use the RSVP feature with everyone, regardless of whether or not they're MyPalm members. You need only provide their email addresses, and MyPalm mails them a URL that they can use to access the RSVP. In turn, the MyPalm portal serves a Web page with the RSVP, recording the response for your later review. This works well because it doesn't force you to encourage everyone you know to run out and sign up for the MyPalm portal just so you can invite them to your next gathering.

Publish
A final feature for groups that doesn't require your friends to have MyPalm accounts is the MyPalm Calendar Publish feature. Using Publish, you can select events from one or more of your calendars and publish them on an open or password-protected Web page served by the MyPalm portal for others to see (as shown in Figure D).

FIGURE D


This is an example of a MyPalm published calendar. Roll over picture for a larger image.

As you add new appointments to your calendars, you can select which events are shown in which published calendars.

The difference between a group's calendar and a published calendar is subtle but important. A group's calendar is available to MyPalm users that are members of a specific group. Group members with the appropriate authorization can add and even edit events in a calendar. A published calendar, on the other hand, is a static Web page available to users outside the MyPalm portal that have the password to access the calendar. Groups are better for when you want to organize a dynamic group of people like a club, while publishing a static calendar is best when you want to offer others, like your friends or extended family, a static snapshot of a subset of your activities over time.