I don’t know about you, but I pretty much live and die by my Calendar! I’m horrible at remembering birthdays, dates, etc. and have kept them all in my Outlook calendar since the days of Outlook 97! With each upgrade to office, I’ve migrated that calendar to the latest Outlook version and started taking it mobile with PDA’s back in the early 2000’s.
Fast-forward to today! As mentioned in my previous post (I love my smartphone), I am an avid smartphone proponent! Unfortunately, syncing and managing your calendar across multiple devices can get a bit daunting! My own list of synced calendars is modest (although not incredibly extreme): two laptops, 1 blackberry, and two Google calendars.
Here are the challenges I’ve run into and the solutions:
Which Calendar is the “Master”: I know there are many of you who would insist on having “multi-master” calendars, but I’m a little old-school in this regard. I’ve found that when problems happen (as they usually do in the world of computers), it’s always helped having one device which was authoritative. In my case, I use my Blackberry as the “master” calendar (it’s always by my side anyhow). All of my other calendars sync with my Blackberry (rather than with each other – with one exception that I’ll discuss later).
The Number of “Slave” Calendars: I used to be a fan of the Palm Treo and Windows Mobile phones. However, they were limited in their Sync capabilities with multiple calendars:
- Palm Desktop: The Intellisync client built into Palm Desktop allowed you to sync (2-way) with one desktop machine, and then have a second machine as a Backup (1-way). Basically, any edits you may make on your “Backup” calendar would be overwritten the next time you ran the Intellisync client.
- Windows ActiveSync/Mobile Device Center: The sync client for Windows smart phones allowed 2-way synchronization, but only between a maximum of two computers. I also ran into issues with Activesync/MDC when the two PC’s ran different versions of the Windows Operating System (i.e. syncing your phone to a Windows Vista and Windows XP machine).
Blackberry Desktop Manager: The sync client for Blackberry smart phones also uses Intellisync (like Palm), however it supports 2-way synchronization with a number of desktop clients. It also seems to work reliably. I’ve only ever run into one issue, which appeared to happen when my Intellisync configuration folder became corrupt.
Best Method to Sync Online Calendars: I tried the Google Calendar Sync and Google Sync for Mobile. The mobile sync client was nice as it performed a 2-way sync of both your calendars and contacts. However, I ran into problems with it duplicating a number of my appointments. For now I’ve settled on using the Calendar sync application on one of my PC’s (the exception I mentioned before) to push updates 1-way from Outlook to Google. In my case, the odds of me actually checking my Google Calendar are small, but it’s nice to have the option.
Syncing Multiple Online Calendars: One more exception to mention. I have my normal Google Calendar (personal), and a Calendar within Google Apps Standard. Rather than sync these with a 3rd-party tool, I’ve simply shared them with each other. This allows each calendar to see the events on the other’s calendar (in a separate color coding). It’s a slick, no-mess way to get this done. I currently don’t sync my Google Apps calendar to my smartphone as it is for a different business than my “work pc” and I only use it for record-keeping of past events (not future events).
In Summary, here is what I have set-up:
- Blackberry Desktop syncing my smartphone to a Personal and Work laptop (2-way sync on both).
- Google Calendar Sync pushing my calendar from one laptop into my Google Calendar.
- Google Calendars shared with each other for reference purposes.
Syncing multiple calendars can be a daunting task. Feel free to Contact Me if you would like help setting this up!
Related posts:
