Syncing feeling

Google has announced a sync tool between Outlook and Google Calendar. Yow! 

It can be done as a 2-way sync, or 1-way (either way).

I’ll be reading the documentation (and help forum) very carefully before doing it, but that would make my life soooooo happy.

UPDATE: Problem #1 – at the moment, it’s only between the default Exchange calendar and the primary Google calendar. Which is not what I want. I want to keep my primary GCal as my personal calendar. Hrm.

UPDATE: Per the FAQ: “No, it’s not possible to sync events on secondary calendars at this time.” Here’s the problem (writing it out for purposes of maybe figuring out something around it). My Primary GCal is personal, associated with my primary Gmail ID. 

I don’t want to turn that into my business calendar mirror. I get invites to my primary Gmail account that are personal, and I don’t want to have to move them into a secondary. By the same token, I don’t want to co-mingle my personal and professional calendar — having my personal appointments sync up to Outlook, or my business appointments showing up in my personal GCal. (Or do I? No, I don’t. That’s what the whole secondary calendar structure is for. I want to be able to see it sometimes and not see it other times.)

Harrumph. I’m pretty certain that secondary calendars will work for this sooner or later. I just wish it was now. Maybe just as well — let Google shake the bugs out.

UPDATE: Wait, maybe it will work … Per the FAQ: 

If your Microsoft Outlook events aren’t being transferred to Google Calendar, check to see if the email address associated with Google Calendar is listed as the organizer or a guest of the event. Please note that it’s not currently possible to sync events with Google Calendar Sync if you’re not the organizer nor a guest.

To sync all events between Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar, the email address associated with Google Calendar needs to match the email address associated with Microsoft Outlook. For example, if you’re using user1@domain.com with your Outlook Calendar, enter user1@domain.com in the Google Calendar Sync Settings window, and then view your synced events with the Google Calendar associated with your user1@domain.com email address. If you don’t yet have Google Calendar set up with your user1@domain.com email address, just visit the Google Calendar homepage and click on “Create a new Google Account.”

Keep in mind that you can view the events from your user1@domain.com email address with any Google Calendar you currently have associated with your other email address. Simply share calendars between the Google Calendar associated with user1@domain.com and the Google Calendar associated with your other email address.

That tells me I *can’t* set up a sync between my “dave@work” addy and my “dave@gmail” addy. I need to create a new GCal for dave@work, then authorize it ot be seen as an “Other” calendar for dave@gmail. Yeah — that should work!

We’ll see.

UPDATE: Okay, set up a dave@work Google account. Downloaded the sync agent. Setting a one-way from Outlook to GCal (we’ll play with two-way once we’re sure it’s solid-solid-solid). So right now it’s updating the 3,000-odd calendar appointments in there …

UPDATE: Potential issue: The updating doesn’t take place between the Exchange server and Google, but on the PC/client. That means the sync process requires Outlook to be open in order to see the account. Which may mean that every [user-defined interval] the client will (like when I first started) try to fire off Outlook. Ick. Yeah, I have Outlook set to prompt me before it fires off, but it’s still annoying. And enough to make me leave the interval set to a long time (default, 2 hours).

UPDATE: So the “open” message doesn’t open the full Outlook app, just enough to read/write the files in a coordinated basis (about 115K footprint in memory). Still annoying. More annoying is that it seems to really want to hang up on the last few percent of all records to sync — very slowly going forward a record every couple of minutes. Not quite sure why.