That Google Calendar to Outlook Sync Thing
Posted on April 22, 2007
19 Comments
For a week or so I was having great success with a product called SyncMyCal. The “restricted” free version was working great and I was getting painless syncing from my Outlook 2003 Pro to Google Calendar. I even had my gcal added to my Netvibes and Google Personal page. Life was good and I was just about to buy the full version.
Then disaster struck.
At the time, it didn’t seem so disastrous, but it seems to be the root cause: I installed ActiveSync 3.8 on the computer doing the syncing. This is the version that works best with my old iPAQ and still supports wifi syncing. For some reason, it also clobbered SyncMyCal. In fact, the toolbar in Outlook disappeared!
Since then I’ve re-installed, repaired, uninstalled (lather, rinse, repeat) several times with varying levels of success. Sometimes I get the toolbar back, sometimes I don’t. Some troubleshooting at their support area led me to a few things to try, but alas… no luck.
This seems like a bad omen for future success:
In their defense, the support articles I found were very clear and easy to follow (article 1, article 2). But no love.
Rich recently said some nice things about his interaction with gSyncit’s author, so I reckon I’ll give that one a look next. Worth a look at any rate — I’ve grown accustomed to having that calendar on my start pages. Any other good/inexpensive options I should look into?
Tags: calendar, google, google-calendar, NetVibes, outlook, start-page, sync, SyncMyCal
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19 Responses to “That Google Calendar to Outlook Sync Thing”
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I’ve just gone through the same process. I looked at four different Google Calendar to Outlook programs, including gsyncit and syncmycal. See http://gtdwannabe.blogspot.com/2007/03/syncing-google-calendar-and-outlook.html
The long and the short of it was: I had no joy. Whatsoever. Your mileage may vary.
Then, I went for syncing between Google Calendar and my Palm directly. See http://gtdwannabe.blogspot.com/2007/03/syncing-google-calendar-and-palm.html
End result: gooSync rocks. Of course, it means going to your Palm first, but that was my ultimate destination anyway. In that last post, I discussed the woes of syncing my palm to goosync with a PPP connection. It turns out that it’s much easier (and cheaper for me) to just use Bluetooth. I laid that out here: http://gtdwannabe.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-bluetooth-to-sync-google-calendar.html
I hope my previous pain helps you find a good solution for you!
Hey there GTD Wannabe - thanks for stopping by! Enjoyed your article. Interesting to see how different our results are.
At first blush, gSyncit may be working pretty well for me. Granted, I’ve only had it installed for 30 minutes, but the initial results are positive. It has that “unregistered timer delay” on some actions which is annoying… but if it keeps working i bet I can find the $10 to get that remedied.
If you want another option you might want to check out calgoo (www.calgoo.com). I’ve been using it on and off since they hit beta and overall I am fairly pleased. I can get my Outlook into it easily and its nice to be able to access my Google Cal the odd time I’m without internet.
Food for thought,
bizz
Thanks bizz, I might just give that one a look. I’ve heard of calgoo, but have yet to actually play with it.
It’s sad that SyncMyCal is conflicting with your setup. Although, I am pretty sure that the support team there can help out with some solution.
I use SyncMyCal (www.syncmycal.com) and it works out perfectly for me. (Admittedly, I do not have ActiveSync). Also, SyncMyCal just released an updated version (which might work for you) along with a PDA version called SyncMyCalMobile.
Cheers.
Take a look at OggSync’s new Outlook pluggin version. It has one way, two way sync to Google calendars. And it allows activesync to still run for your mobile support. And there is a free lite version.
-OggSupport
gSyncIt stopped working for me after 2 days (perhaps it was the reboot?).
Vaibhav - perhaps I’ll try SyncMyCal’s support.
Cece - thanks, I’ll have a look at that one as well.
Hey Cece - your site appears down.
Yeah, there was some downtime yesterday, but everything is up and running. Please give it another try.
http://oggsync.com
OggSync for Outlook has some potential… I just need to find time to track down a few wrinkles and then hope to put up an article.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Have you tried going to their website? Just a suggestion, if you haven’t already done so.
Hi “MN Web Design” - Indeed, I’ve been to their site.
If you look at the article, check out the “support area”, “article 1″ and “article 2″ links.
Just to update you guys, the SyncMyCal team is right now working on this specific problem. They are going to come up with a version which doesn’t conflict with ActiveSync soon…
Cheers.
Vaibhav - that’s great to hear!
Oh, whoops! I’m sorry!
After reading through this read I was wondering if it would be possible to circumvent buying PocketMirror from chapura and use a couple of these limited use sync software to sync outlook to google and then google to my old m100?
any ideas would be appreciated.
Hello,
I’ve been trying the open source RemoteCalendars. If I use it always in the same location it works fine, but I’m moving around quite a lot with chaning proxy/firewall settings, and RemoteCalendars is just not up to that. It hangs my Outlook every time I start it in a new location with wrong proxy settings.
I’m looking into all the software I can find right now. I’ll write out my experience in a few days in my blog (http://www.kjube.be/tnenopxe/index.php?section=5)
Good luck,
J
We just launched KiGoo, a free tool that allows Google users to fully manage (create, read, update and delete) their Calendar and Contacts from MS Outlook.
Also KiGoo manage the Free Busy information of your Gmail contacts for appointments if they shared their FB status.
Currently we support Windows XP and office 2007.
http://www.getkigoo.com