Outlook + Google = Calendar Harmony

I’ve been using Google Calendar Sync for about a month now, and after releasing a patch recently, it appears to be working like a charm.

I am chained to my Outlook calendar at work—many of you can relate; I have also been using Google Calendar since it was released to keep track of personal appointments, tasks and deadlines.  The problem, of course, was that these two calendars had communication issues.  I downloaded and used SyncMyCal to manually get the two systems communicating, but there were bugs (the toolbar would mysteriously vanish forcing me to reinstall), and worst of all, I had to remember to manually initiate the calendar sync anytime I booked a new meeting.

Fortunately, for those of you as lazy as me, Google released their own tool that automatically syncs an Outlook calendar with a Google calendar.  Users may sync both ways, or one way (I only sync Outlook up to Google) at timed intervals.  This is a wonderful way for me to be able to access my Outlook appointments from anywhere (in the event that I am sans Blackberry), and more importantly share my schedule with people outside of work.

Now that this synchronization has become effortless, I anticipate moving even more data into my Google calendar in order to use it as a hub of all family, personal and professional activity and deadlines.  I am already automatically pulling in concert recommendations from Last.fm as well as weather forecasts.  And all Google asks in return is to present me with relevant text advertisements… and my eternal soul.

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