I’ve got four computers I use regularly, two laptops and two desktops (one each at the office and at home). The desktops don’t generally move but one or both laptops go with me on the road depending on the situation. Additionally my Cloudbook will be arriving soon (today hopefully). So, I might be sitting in front of any one of these computers and need to know what my calendar is. The four main machines all run Outlook while the Cloudbook won’t. I’ve got a Google Calendar account but in the past you’ve not been able to (easily or completely) sync content between Outlook and Google calendars.
I had a partial solution in my Motorola Q smartphone but the Windows software would only let me sync with up to two computers (my office desktop and my home laptop) but that left out the other computers. I also have Web access to our Exchange server via Outlook Web access but to be honest, Outlook just isn’t the same as a Web application. (And I’m doubting that it’ll work well on the Cloudbook since it doesn’t work all that well in Firefox on a Windows machine to begin with.)
So yesterday, I was VERY excited to hear that the folks over at Google had released their first version of Google Calendar Sync. This program is both simple and elegant. Download it from Google, and run the quick install. You’ll then get this screen:
Enter your Google Calendar login information, then choose if you want to sync in both directions, just Google to Outlook, or just Outlook to Google. Lastly, set how often you’d like the content to re-sync and click Save.
The program will minimize to your system tray and sync your data. How much more simpler could it be?
I now have four copies of Outlook all with the same calendar along with my phone. Now, no matter which computer I have with me, I can enter a new appointment and shortly all of my other computers will have that same information.
I’ve been using http://www.scheduleworld.com/ for a bit to accomplish the same thing- the main advantage is that it syncs with Evolution, too, which I use on my Linux machine. (Of course, the next version of Evolution is supposed to do two way syncing w/ gcal automatically…) It also offers LDAP to sync to lots of other calendar programs.
The outlook sync from ScheduleWorld is very nice- GUI, pretty, can run in background. The Evolution sync, unfortunately, requires setting options in a text file. Worked fine one I got it set, though.