Calendar

Microsoft provides several excellent calendaring services through its Hotmail and Exchange technologies, with the latter surfacing not just in traditional, enterprise‑based versions of Exchange Server but also in the far more affordable and accessible Office 365 service. Powering these services on the back end is a Microsoft technology called Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), which provides push‑based support for e‑mail, contacts, tasks, and, yes, calendaring. EAS is a de facto industry standard, it’s used even by Microsoft competitors such as Apple and Google, and it’s at the heart of Microsoft’s new Calendar app.

Like the Windows Phone app on which it is based, Calendar is a connected calendar, one that is designed to work in concert with one or more online calendars, in this case calendars that are provided using EAS technologies. So it works with Microsoft calendars such as Hotmail Calendar and Exchange/Office 365, of course, but also calendars from other companies, such as Google Calendar.

If you set up Windows 8 to sign in with a Microsoft account as we recommended early on in the book (and you did, right?), then you already have a Hotmail Calendar. And that calendar is automatically available through the Calendar app. You can, of course, configure other calendars as well.