Google has finally added a way to see your Google Calendar and most recent Docs into the sidebar of it Gmail webmail product. While these two features seem like simple additions to the Gmail sidebar, Google is actually going much deeper, allowing users to add other functionality to their email in the form of a gadget.

Google Calendar integration into Gmail is long awaited and many would say overdue. It’s the only major webmail provider not to include access to its calendar feature through the email interface. This is especially noticeable because Google Calendar is arguably the best calendar feature among the top web companies.

Now Google has rectified its oversight and created a sidebar Gadget that displays upcoming calendar events in Gmail as you can see at left. You can view all upcoming appointments or click on the ‘Today’ link to focus on your schedule for the day. You can now add calendar events now right from Gmail as well. Lastly the Google Calendar Gadget can also alert you to upcoming appointments by displaying a reminder.

Below the calendar gadget, at left, is the Google Docs Gadget. Google Docs is the company’s online office suite that allows you to edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations and store them online. The Google Docs Gadget displays your most-recently views Google Docs in the sidebar of your Gmail interface. It also includes a search feature to allow you to find any of your documents quickly and easily.

What promises to be even more interesting is the potential for other new gadgets in Gmail. Google has inserted these two sidebar widgets as part of a larger Google Gadgets capability in Gmail. Google Gadgets are small pieces of content that can contain virtually any kind of content from weather or news updates to maps or other email accounts.

Google Gadgets were originally created as part of iGoogle, a product that allows users to build their own page from pieces of content from other sites. That way you can get a glimpse of your email, weather and favorite news sites from your own personalized page. iGoogle has built a small but dedicated following and a fairly extensive developer community.

Now that Google is bringing the gadgets framework to Gmail, it opens up countless possibilities for what functionality users can add to their email interface. You can already add any other gadget from Google’s library, but the process isn’t terribly user friendly quite yet. To add other gadgets you will have to find the link to the gadget’s source which can be taken from its URL in the library starting with the second http:// in the link. Hopefully this process will get easier in time and we will see more productivity features in Gmail.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 8:39 am under Google, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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