Going Ga-Ga over GooSync

Date November 13, 2006

I love Google Calendar, and I love my Windows Mobile Smartphone too, but synchronizing appointments between the two is, quite frankly, a pain in the arse.

What makes it more complex for me is that I run one Google Calendar, but two Outlook calendars on two separate machines. If this seems strange, let me explain – my personal Outlook calendar runs on my home PC and I use Outlook for calendaring so that I can sync my appointments on my Smartphone; the clients I work with prefer not maintain freelancers as external contacts on their Exchange servers, so my laptop usually gets plugged into my their networks, making Outlook on the laptop “work only”. Again, I want to see those calendar appointments on my Smartphone.

I’ve tried Remote Calendars, and although Google-to-Outlook works quite well, I’ve never managed to get Outlook-to-Google working, and looking at the support forum, I’m not alone. I’ve also tried CompanionLink, but that seemed to treat each sync as a “refresh whole calendar” request, meaning I ended up with multiple, duplicate entries on both Outlook and my Google Calendar.

So when I heard about GooSync on Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, I didn’t get my hopes up, but sometimes having low expectations means that you get a pleasant surprise!

Installing the software on to the handset is fairly painless – use Explorer on your PC to drop the .cab file on to your phone, and then use Explorer on your phone to run the .cab file. Then you create an account with GooSync, and register your calendar details with them. At the Smartphone end of things you provide the details of your GooSync account.

I have to admit that when I hit the “Sync” key for the first time, I was expecting it to go horribly wrong – duplicated appointments, or worse, a calendar reset - but in fact it did exactly what it said on the tin! For the first time, I have trouble-free synchronization between my Google Calendar and Outlook on my Smartphone.

The only thing I’d like to do now (and this isn’t a problem for GooSync to figure out; it’s an ActiveSync thing) is have one-way push from the Outlook Calendar on my laptop to my phone rather than two-way sync, so if anyone knows how can I achieve that, I would love to hear from you!

[tags]Google Calendar, calendar, Outlook, sync, GooSync, Remote Calendars, CompanionLink, Windows Mobile[/tags]

Category Posted in Google, productivity, smartphone, software

5 Responses to “Going Ga-Ga over GooSync”

  1. random374 said:

    November 27th, 2006 at 4:53 am

    A direct over-the-air sync is available at http://www.saraiya.com

  2. andrew said:

    November 28th, 2006 at 11:42 pm

    Thanks for link, random374, I’ll give that a try!

  3. Chou Doufu said:

    December 9th, 2006 at 9:16 pm

    I have great hopes for Goosync, but for now I’m using ScheduleWorld. There are important privacy concerns that potential users of Goosync need to inform themselves about. Also Googync does not yet support recurring appointments, which is a major drawback for me.

    I wrote up a fairly detailed review of Goosync here that discusses these issues:

    http://www.squidoo.com/goosync/

  4. andrew said:

    December 9th, 2006 at 10:30 pm

    Thanks Chou – Your review is really good. I didn’t realise there was an update for GooSync. And, you’re right – not being able to sync recurring appointments is a drawback. I think that’s why some users have been reporting duplicate appointments.

  5. Software Review: GooSync Calendar Synchronization Utility | The View said:

    November 21st, 2008 at 7:50 pm

    [...] http://andrewterry.com/2006/11/13/going-ga-ga-over-goosync/ – Another GooSync review [...]