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31 Aug 2011 : Syncing my Google Calendar #
At work I use Outlook, since the University uses MS Exchange and the nature of collaboration tools is that you have to use what other people are using. However, for some time now I've also been syncing this with a Google Calendar so that I can also make some of the details available on this site. Google provides a free syncing tool, but this had various limitations, such as only being able to sync one calendar, making it no good for what I wanted. The solution was to use a piece of software called SyncMyCal. For the record, this is a great piece of software that does a straightforward task very well. Once it's properly configured, it's the kind of software that works best if you don't notice it again, which is exactly how things were until recently. It was well worth the asking price.
So, this worked great for ages, until half a year or so ago the University started upgrading the Exchange servers, and I upgraded my machine to Outlook 2010. SyncMyCal was only compatible with Outlook 2003.
My solution at the time was to continue running OUtlook 2003 with SyncMyCal on a separate machine. This kind of worked, but had problems. The machine would get turned off and I wouldn't notice, or it would reboot after an automatic update leaving Outlook asleep on the hard drive. My Google calendar was only updated intermittently. Nobody really cared, except for me, since it increased the disorder in my world and kept me locked in to running an old machine just for the sake of syncing.
Until yesterday that is. On the offchance I checked the SyncMyCal site yesterday and found they'd finally released an Outlook 2010 version of their tool. Yay!
The result is that now my calendars are syncing normally, the version on this site is telling the truth, rather than some partial version of it, and the world - for me at least - has become a little more ordered!