Is The Mobile, Office, Home Calendar Sync Panacea Here Yet?

I can't put my finger on exactly when, but I'm sure as far back as the first time a cell phone could display and calendar and sync with my computer, I have been in search of the perfect way to be able to see my current calendar from anywhere, anytime. This includes on my phone, from home, from the office or anywhere I can get to the internet.

Every year or so, I go in search of products and start piecing them together to see how close I can get to the panacea of the perfectly synced life. This time, I think I'm REALLY close. Below is a diagram of how I have FINALLY linked my calendar world together. In my scenario I have my home and office PCs, both running Outlook Calendar, I have my "can't live without" iPhone, a Google Gmail account calendar and Google's recently release Google Calendar Sync program(although there are some problems here, so keep reading).





First apologies to the Mac world as I use a PC computer at this time, although my "Mac Envy" has risen to new heights recently and I may join you shortly. But, having said that, I don't see why this system wouldn't work by replacing any of the PC representations in the diagram and using the Mac iCal program, along with Google's Calender. Many instructions are available on the web to do this by searching for gcal and ical in Google.

So, based on the diagram above, this is what I do. At home, when in Outlook, I just add events to my calendar as needed and view my full schedule in my Google calendar online. I don't rely on the home Outlook calendar except to enter NEW events. Therefore I have chosen the Google Sync setup option of doing 1 way sync from Outlook to Google to avoid potential duplication problems. While at the office, I enter items in Outlook calendar. I have Google Sync doing 2 way sync so any new items to Google are on my office PC and vice versa. I then have 2 way sync my iPhone through iTunes on the office PC to get the updated office PC Outlook calendar in the iPhone's calendar application and vice versa. Finally I can update/add event items in my Google calendar, anywhere, anytime over a web browser. The stars have aligned.......

The end result is the ability to access, add, edit any event items from any of my devices. This might seem cumbersome to set up, but it's really not. I'm sure it took less time to actually do the setup than it did to write this article.

Finally, a word of caution. It seems like the latest version, as of this date, of the Google Calendar Sync tool has an issue with Outlook 2003(Error Code: %d). It was very frustrating to come so close to my panacea and then have Google's automatic software updating tool completely blow this away for me. It took a lot of searching and actually carefully navigating a French web site that I did not understand, to again find the original version of the Google Sync program that worked so well. So to assist the other's on the search to fix their non-functioning Google Sync tool who do not speak French I have made the earlier version(sans la bug), Google Calendar Sync 0.9.3.0 available here. If you run into the error mentioned above, I would suggest uninstalling Google Sync, installing this version and then test on your own as new versions come out to see if the problem has been resolved.