Thursday, March 25, 2010

Getting Synced





I have a personal Gmail account which activesync's Contacts, Mail and Personal Calendar. Problem is I have two other seperate work related calendars on a different system and they don't sync to my phone.

The first is my business Google Apps account where I receive lots of Calendar invites next I have my work laptop Outlook account which is critical but only while I am in this client's engagement.

So with all these various data sources I thought it may be too difficult to patch together all the Calendar and event sources into my single wimpy iPhone. It really wasn't that hard at all, read on:

Personal Gmail - Outlook Active Sync to "m.google.com" (Sync Calendar, Contacts, Mail)

story: When Jess quit her job to move to a competitor she gave me a heads up about the company taking her blackberry, within 15 minutes and while driving :) we set her BB to bi-direction sync (just type m.google.com into the BB browser and download app over the air). We then removed the sync app, wiped her contacts from the phone and repeat the process to pull down contacts onto her new BB. If you ever stress about losing your phone and contacts this is your best solution regardless of your phone choice.

Work Google Apps Account - This is standard IMAP connection to my iPhone, and an additional CalDAV account for syncing the additional calendar! This I did not think was possible until doing some research.


Client Outlook Account - Download the Windows Google Sync utility and set it up to PUSH from Outlook TO one of your Gmail accounts already on your phone, pick the one with the most potential conflicts then you can pull it up in the browser and re-arrange/re-schedule.

That's it, I will hopefully never be late to another meeting again! (yea right)