4588.aspx

Synchronize Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook

Google recently released the free Google Calendar Sync application:

It supports three ways of synchronization with Microsoft Outlook:

• 2-way: All events in your primary Google Calendar and your default Microsoft Outlook calendar will be synced together. Any changes you make to events in either Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook Calendar will be reflected in both applications.


• 1-way: Google Calendar to Microsoft Outlook calendar. All events in your primary Google Calendar will be added to your default Microsoft Outlook calendar. During subsequent sync cycles, any updates made to events in Google Calendar will be reflected in Microsoft Outlook Calendar as well.


• 1-way: Microsoft Outlook calendar to Google Calendar. All events in your default Microsoft Outlook calendar will be added to your primary Google Calendar. During subsequent sync cycles, any updates made to events in Microsoft Outlook Calendar will be reflected in Google Calendar.

This release does not seem to copy the “private” flag but I am sure they will fix that in a future release.

I have tried Google Calendar Sync and several other applications. In the end I chose for SyncMyCal. It is not free, but it lets me synchronize both my office calendar and private calendar (both Google Apps based) to Outlook. Each appointment gets a different category/label in Outlook depending on the calendar so I can clearly distinguish between the two. It has a lot options that let you tune the synchronization and it even has a Pocket PC client so you can synch directly from you Windows Mobile device over the air. At the moment I use the PC version but I expect to migrate to the Windows Mobile version as soon as Google lets me synchronize my contacts with Google Apps as well.