Here’s the situation. I have a corporate email account on
hosted exchange (Microsoft BPOS) and this is my work email,
calendar, and contacts. I also have a Google apps domain for my
personal email, calendar and contacts. I am a Google voice user
and share my Google apps calendar with my wife. It is essential
that these calendars and contacts are the same. I also have an
iPhone that uses the exchange active sync connection and have to
Goggle apps account setup for email only.
In the dark days of owning my blackberry, I tried to sync
everything using the Google app on the phone. The results were
disastrous. I had to undo the sync and restore from a backup. I
also received errors all the time saying that the contacts and
calendar were being synched by another program (Enterprise
activated) and could not complete or a duplicate would be created.
This time around, I said that I need the application to reside
my desktop to handle the issue. I searched and searched for
something free to do this but could not find it. Add to the
complexity that I am running office 2010 x64 edition. This only
further narrowed my options.
After searching for a while, I found Gsyncit. (http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/).
I read all about it and decided it was going to do everything I
wanted it to. The app is $14.99, but very much so worth every
penny. It took about 10 minutes to setup, and then I had some
de-duplicating to do in contacts because the contacts between
Google Apps domain and Outlook were already out of sync from me
manually doing it when I remembered to. The de-duplication process
to about 20 minutes. I have almost 300 contacts so not to bad.
But here’s where I ended up after my $14.99 purchase and 30
minutes of work. All contacts and calendars are synched between
the two accounts. If I make a change on my phone while I am on the
road, it gets updated to corporate exchange. Then when I get back
to the office, I load Outlook and all those changes are synched
back to the Google side. I can also accept invitations from either
of my accounts in any method I want. Then changes are synched
later when Outlook is loaded on my desktop. Finally, since all my
contacts are in sync, Goggle voice calls are very rarely unknown
callers any more and I am no longer required to press 1 to accept
the call of an unknown caller.
To be a complete nerd for a little bit, I have been trying to
accomplish this for a very long time. I have seen Gsyncit for a
while but really didn’t want to pay $14.99. It has been a
frustrating uphill battle to get these all in sync but now that
they are, I feel major satisfaction.
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