Jim Breen’s Blather

I don’t know when Google released this, but I just noticed yesterday that Google Calendar can now sync with MS Outlook. I got really excited. I use Outlook/Exchange at work, but I manage all my personal calendars, including a shared one with my wife, in Google Calendar. SpanningSync gets the calendars onto my Mac and iPhone. The last step to obtaining the Grand Unified Calendar was the stupid work calendar. I would even be thrilled if Outlook just supported iCal feeds, so imagine what a joyous surpise it was to learn that Google was giving me 2-way sync!

Too bad it doesn’t work.

I first tried a one-way sync from Outlook to gCal and quickly discovered that Google Calendar Sync with MS Outlook is a non-starter for three reasons:

1) It doesn’t sync my meetings. This is a pretty big shortcoming since that’s really all it is supposed to do. Sure, it moved a couple calendar items from Outlook to gCal, but most of them did not sync. I can’t find a definitive pattern about what syncs and what doesn’t. Recurring meetings never synced. Some meetings I created synced, some didn’t. Some meeting requests from others that I accepted synced, some didn’t.

2) The primary Outlook calendar is synced with the primary Google calendar. No. No. No. Google, you give me multiple calendars, and I use them. I don’t want my work meetings polluting the personal calendar that I share with my wife. It’s so obvious that the Outlook calendar should show up as a separate new calendar in gCal that at first I thought the sync wasn’t working at all – where’s the new calendar? It’s ridiculous that it adds the synced items to my existing calendar. I’m flabbergasted. I can’t talk about this anymore.

3) “Maybe if I just let it run overnight it will fix itself.” I really wanted this to work. Unfortunately, when I took a look at Outlook in the morning, there were 30-40 blank calendar items in my Deleted Items folder for *every* time that the sync ran. Do I care about what’s in my Deleted Items? No, not really. But this is yet another sign that this thing is half-baked.

Uninstall. Sorry Google. Let me know when 2.0 is out.