For time and again, the company has proven that despite all its talk, its offerings are as unreliable as those of any other service provider.

I do sympathise with Om and everyone else who has put their trust in Google to run their email, but we need a reality check here. Just because Google has seemingly infinite resources, it doesn’t make them immune from the kind of challenges that face IT departments in companies, large and small, all over the world.

Anyone who’s provided, implemented or supported IT services for any length of time will tell you that, no matter what risk mitigation/platform resilience measures you put in place; no matter how well you test your changes ahead of implementation; no matter how thorough your change review process, every now and then the technology will fail, something will screw up and service outages will occur.

As Om himself offered in one of his previous posts, following the last Gmail outage:

1. Get used to outages. Why? Scale forces history to repeat. As the Internet matures, we expect it to operate more smoothly, so outages make it look like you’re falling behind. But outages can also be a sign of that very maturation. Companies will learn to avoid them, then as the whole thing scales up and grows more complex, it will happen again. There will always be outages, inside the cloud and out.

I couldn’t have put better myself.

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]