Outlook <—> Google Calendar. Part III
Posted on May 7, 2007
16 Comments
Ok seriously, this is becoming a pain in the rear… Maybe I should change the title to “Outlook versus Google Calendar.”
I mentioned OggSync a week or so ago. Since that article I’ve lost their custom toolbar about every 4 or 5 days. This is the toolbar that has the “Sync Calendar” button on it. As you might guess, it is rather necessary.
Each time it goes missing, I uninstall, go to the OggSync website and get the latest beta (up to 3.08 as of this writing). Install, and enjoy my toolbar again.
To be fair, aside from the “Sync Calendar” button disappearing from time to time, it has been working quite well. Painless. Easy to setup. Fast even. I’ve been pleased.
This last iteration of uninstall/reinstall is, however, probably the final straw. While I did indeed get my toolbar back, it isn’t syncing. At the moment, I’m too weary of it all to care any more.
*sigh*
I might give SyncMyCal another shot — looks like a newer version was released since my last attempt.
I just want to see my stinking Outlook calendar on my iGoogle or Netvibes page. That’s all I want…
Tags: calendar, google-calendar, OggSync, outlook, sync, SyncMyCal
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16 Responses to “Outlook <—> Google Calendar. Part III”
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….even if the newest version of SyncMyCal doesn’t work for you, just be patient. The SyncMyCal folks are working on a version which should not conflict with any Outlook plugin/add-in.
Cheers.
I tried every single possible tool to sync Outlook with Google Cal, and came to the conclusion it simply wasn’t possible. The main problem is that even with the best intentions, these applicatons always generate duplicates.
The best bet it to use Outlook only and access the data from whatever you happen to be using without attempting to generate duplicate data which will never be in sync.
@Astorg - GTD Wannabe pretty much said the same thing in an earlier comment. I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel, but it is getting a bit discouraging.
@Vaibhav - I look forward to seeing that new version.
Guys,
Believe me when I say that SyncMyCal does work. I don’t get ANY duplicates or whatsoever when I use it. They have the greatest coverage for Recurring Events (though some exception still may not work). And their support staff rocks….
Yeah, they have their share of customers for whom it doesn’t work, but they go to lengths to figure out their problems and generate patches.
I know of instances where they actually had shared desktop sessions over GoToMeeting with customers to figure out problems.
Cheers.
Thanks for sticking with us. Yes we are up to 3.09 with OggSync (which will fix the sync issue in 3.07), and there are some minor bugs that we know about (deleting a recurring event instance in Outlook currently doesn’t delete the Google counterpart, although moving it works fine).
Maybe you can cut us a little slack, we’ve only been doing Outlook for 2 weeks now, whereas our competition has been doing it a lot longer. We are still trying to find why the toolbar disappears for some users (we haven’t seen it happend yet).
Any information as far as your setup would be helpful, like if you have any other Add-ins.
Best!
3.09! Ok, I’ll grab that tomorrow AM and give it a go. The one that won’t sync is a meeting — maybe that’s the issue? It’s the result of an Invite.
If you’ve been doing Outlook for just 2 weeks, you’re doing great. Honest, I’m not calling you names. Just a bit frustrated.
If you want to take this to chat or email for troubleshooting some evening, I’m all ears — just hit my About/Contact link.
For right now, the only Add-ins I have are Spam-Bayes and whatever ActiveSync installs (if that’s considered an Add-in?).
OggSync 3.0.9 is working well.
And as the nice OggSync fella pointed out via IM, the free version is limited to the date range that it syncs. THe meeting that wasn’t getting synced is outside the range.
I feel a bit like a dope.
ive been digging through the calgoo forums and it appears they will have this functionality for their next release. hard to say if it will work how you want it until i see it but ive enjoyed the program so far (as I stated in a previous edition of this blog).
bizz
Heyas Bizz: How are you using calgoo?
When I first glanced at it, it seemed overly much to for my desire to “simply” sync outlook to gcal. Am I missing the point though?
right now you cant just sync back and forth - next release it looks like that will be happening. a hack for the mean time is to import your outlook and copy the appointments into your google (not the best solution I know). Im not sure when it will happen - but they say very soon you’ll be able to go outlook calgoo google and back again. the simple part for you i guess would be when this happens you can set it up and just minimize it to your system tray and forget about it - it will auto sync the two as needed.
sorry this doesnt quite get what you want done right now - but ive been pleased with their progress (was rather difficult to use when they first came out and have since fixed tons of problems) and think they will deliver on their promises.
if either of the two syncing options you’re using right now don’t pan out for you then keep an eye on calgoo - between the amount of effort they have put in in implementing requests ive made and helping me with troubleshooting etc ive become a fan
Also for those reading, the missing toolbar was related to not having the Microsoft patches applied. Chris installed (understandably) with the .msi file and not with the setup.exe file. The setup.exe is what installs all the patches, if you install with the .msi file only, you miss the patch that fixes the missing toolbar (Microsoft) bug.
Granted - the other 8 install/re-installs were full installs…
OggSync was working great for the last week. No complaints and I was very pleased.
Today, I noticed my toolbar was gone again. I’ll be back in touch with the support folks soon.
Grrr… Sorry Chris, give me an email at support@oggsync.com and I’ll give you some things to look at. We’ll get to the bottom of it.
Email on the way, Sean. Thanks!
I feel your pain on this. It sounds like you were in the same boat I was. I ended up writing my own outlook publishing service (i didn’t need sync…I just wanted my outlook calendar to show up in google). Given the “delicate flower” that is outlook, I didn’t want to install another plugin, so I wanted a zero install solution. I ended up using the built in calendar publishing capability of outlook with some server side hosting and data massaging. Works awesome. You can do something similar if you are motivated using a webdav server and the gdata api or draft off of me using http://www.moosesync.com.
Hey Erik, thanks for the link. That’s an interesting approach to take.