GTD Wannabe

Syncing Google Calendar and Outlook

March 16th, 2007 | by GTD Wannabe |

Update 17 Mar 07: I’ve received a lovely, helpful email from someone at CompanionLink, offering to extend my trial of that software, and help me figure it out. He’s also provided some additional information about their products. I’m out of town right now, but as soon as I get back, I’ll update the post and table. Check back in a couple of days :)

Update 18 Mar 07: I’ve updated the table below with the new CompanionLink information.

One of the reasons I was tied to Outlook in the past for keeping track of my hard landscape (calendar) and Next Action lists (todos) was because I wanted the ability to to have these things on my Palm.

Last year, I moved to a different system for my next actions – it consists of a text file and some Perl scripts + DOS batch files. More recently my primary calendar also became text-based, using Cygwin and Remind (more about this in some future post).

But I still want the link to my Palm. I’ve even gone so far as creating a Perl script to translate each of my NAs into a task in Outlook (one-way sync). And for quite a few months, I was duplicating my calendar entries, putting them both into my text file and Outlook. Plus spending much time making sure that they were manually in sync. What kind of foolishness is that?

I’ve since decided that I don’t need to have my NA list with me at all times. If there’s going to be a time where I think I might want that, I can just print out the current list (sorted by context even) and take it with me.

However, the calendar still remained a problem. I want to have a current calendar on me, so that when I need to set up an appointment some time in the future, I can do that.

There has been more and more talk about being able to sync Google Calendar and Outlook (or even straight to PDA). I’ve figured out a relatively easy way to get my text calendar into a format that Google can read. So now, it’s just a question of syncing Google Calendar and Outlook. Surely, among many options now out there, I can find a solution?

The Contenders

There are several applications out there, geared specifically to syncing your Google Calendar with Outlook. (I was only concerned about Outlook 2003, but at least one offers to handle 2007 as well, as well as back to 97).

• gSyncIt

• Available from some place called Dave’s Website, this appears to be a nice little app created by someone for his own personal use, and put out there for the rest of the world. It gives you a new toolbar in Outlook that you can use to configure your syncronization. Both manual and automatic syncing are supported. The date range is good – going back 365 days and forward 365 days. Only the default calendar is supported for two-way syncing, but this is supposed to be an issue with the Google Calendar API.

Remote Calendars

• This is an open-source project, the code for which is found on SourceForge. I found two blog posts explaining how to install and configure it. Here’s the original one, that even claims that the installation is tricky, and a second one that goes into even more detail. The Remote Calendars app allows a user to “subscribe, reload and delete a generic remote iCalendar from Outlook”; so it’s possible you could use this, even if Google Calendars wasn’t your intended calendar. Again, the range is good (+-365 days), and two-way syncing is offered for the default Google calendar. Autosync is available. Being open-source, the price is right too.

SyncMyCal

• This is a commercial product, with two flavours – light and pro. The light version limits you to a 7 day date range, and no autosync. The pro version boosts this to “any” date range, and gives you autosync. It also supports two-way sync, multiple calendars, and all sorts of other goodies, all for $25. This one seems to be the most feature rich.

CompanionLink for Google Calendars

• Another commercial offering; this one gives you a 14-day trial period. This one gives you the most potential targets: Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Palm Desktop, Groupwise. For $29.95, you get the ability to do two-way sync of your default calendar, including appointments, reminders, recurring events, details, notes, etc. 2007-03-18 17:49 Update from CompanionLink: They have two versions, “Lite” and “Pro”, the only difference between the two being that with Pro, you can sync to a different folder than your default Outlook folder. In addition, although CompanionLink doesn’t offer autosync support, it is possible to “manually” autosync using the task manager. Instructions for this are here. Finally, they’re looking into the new API for Google Calendars and are developing the ability to handle multiple calendars – current and future customers will be eligible for this upgrade, free of charge.

Summary

In order to help you decide if any of these interest you, I’ve created a small table, summarizing the features and prices of these products.

My Take

You may or may not have noticed a certain lack of enthusiasm in this post. That lack is caused by the fact that even though I really want to be able to use one of these apps (at this point in time, any one of them), I could not get a single one of these programs to work for me. Given that all four of them have failed for me, I’m assuming that there’s something wrong with my configuration, either with my Google Calendar (although even an empty calendar caused me grief), or my Outlook installation. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve got both .NET 1 and .NET 2 on my machine. Maybe these program’s don’t like the weather up here. Who knows.

I’ve spent a few hours here and there over the past few weeks trying to get any one of these working for me. No joy. I’ve scoured through the help/FAQ looking for answers. No joy there either. Here’s a description of the grief that each of these has caused me:

• gSyncIt: Installs; gives me a nice toolbar; lets me configure for my default Google Calendar. When it comes time to sync, I keep getting an “Index out of bounds error”. I’ve sent an email to the developer, hoping for some joy.
• Remote Calendars: I’ve gone through the installation process at least four times. Even though no errors ever occur, I never get it to start – there’s never a toolbar in my Outlook, even though there’s supposed to be.
• SyncMyCal: Like gSyncIt; installs and gives me a nice toolbar. Seemingly hangs when syncing. The one time that I let it run all the way through, got an “Index out of bounds error”. (Seems to do the same thing as gSyncIt, but much much slower.)
• CompanionLink: Tried installing it a couple of weeks ago, but could never get it to find my Google Calendar. When I went back to it today, my 14-day trial period had expired, so no more testing for this one.

Now, I’m now laying this out here to tell you to stay away from these applications – I’m just saying that they’re not working for me. Most likely, they will work for you. I’d love to hear from anyone who gets them to work for them – maybe we can compare notes.