Syncing stuff seriously saves stuff

sweet

Decided to synchronise absolutley everything I can the other day. This entry is mainly to remind me of how it all works (not that its hugely complicated). Perhaps it might prove useful for another person out there.

What needs synchronising:
Personal Calendar
Work Calendar (Outlook 2k7/Exchange)
Mobile Calendar (Sony Ericsson c905)

I suppose you could suggest that the mobile one is personal too, but i'd cry if you did.

The crux of this synchronisation is Google Calendar, which I have attached to my email account anyway. Google caldenar has a number of important features that are relied on here. Its free, its available on t'internet, it doesn't cost anything and the google developers like toying with shit and making new stuff available (for free, nearly forgot to mention that!)

Anyway, the trick is to have all your respective calendars synchronise with the Google Calendar.

A little bit of google fu later and I found that GCal (as I'm going to call it) has a little application that you can install, and what it does is synchronise Outlook's archaic calendar format with Google's. Good luck persuading yout IT chap to install this for you. Unless I'm your IT chap, in which case feel free to atempt to bribe me. My price is L. O. W.

Next up with my personal one, this was easy, as there aren't any restrictions on what software I use, so I went with 'Sunbird' cos it has native calDAV support (calDAV being the new protocol for distributed calendar synchronisation). I'll probably replace this with Thunderbird and the Lightening plugin because, quite frankly, Sunbird is nasty.

Then came the tricky bit. The mobile phone. Turns out it wasn't tricky at all. There is a wonderful man out there who has written a java app called GCalSync that you can install on your mobile phone, and it synchronises your mobiles calendar with a google one! Much love to that man.

Easy!

Now I'm all sync'd up! Sweet. There are a couple of things that don't tie in properly. GCal has the functionallity to text me the days itinery, which is cool but I can't set that option when I'm entering dates from any of the other devices and it appears that it can only send these texts at 5am, so thats a no go.

Other problems have manifested in that some of the crap i have on a repeating schedule at work have made a mess of my phone's calendar, but nothing major!

Now all I have to do is remember to use it.


An interesting side note. I'm aware that there are some who are already whining on about Google owning all your data and how they'll be the next microsoft. I can understand the argument, but I did look for alternatives (Yahoo's new webcalendar looks nice - although its still in beta. Office 2K7 provides some functionality for uploading your calendar but I spent half a day fucking around with that at work a few weeks ago and its awful.) There are alternatives, but none of them have the functionality or support. Basically, until Google stop doing it right I'm just going to get further and further locked in.