Synchronise Google Calendar with Outlook

Web Worker Daily has a great tip for those of you who want to synchronise Google Calendar with Outlook.  SyncMyCal is a solution for those of you who want to maintain copies of your calendars on both Google Calendar and on Outlook and be able to update either version and have both synchronised:

• Two-way calendar synchronization – Outlook to Google and Google to Outlook
• Selective event synchronization through date range selection
• Flexibility of publishing/not publishing private events information in Outlook Calendar to Google Calendar
• Multiple Google Calendars can be connected to single Outlook Calendar and vice versa
• Support for Time zone differences in calendars through automatic schedule adjustment
• Feature for Publishing FREE/BUSY or complete information for events
• Auto Update Feature
• Synchronize event information with your PDA (coming soon)

One of the disadvantages of Google Calendar is that it does not support two way synchronisation so you need tools like this one to be able to do that.  So why would you want two way synchronisation?  Well one reason is convenience.  If you synchronise your mobile device with Outlook to ensure that you have a current version of your diary and address book in your device when you are away from your computer then have probably encountered many situations where you set up a meeting when you are out and about and record the details of the meeting in your device.

The only this that you want to have those meeting details recorded in Google Calendar because that is where you maintain your primary diary.  This tool should enable you to do just that by first synchronising your device (with the new event information) with Outlook and then synchronising Outlook with Google Calendar.

SyncMyCal comes in two versions, SyncMyCal Lite and SyncMyCal Pro with the main difference being the date ranges that can be synchronised.  The Lite version (free) only seems to synchronise a 7 day time period whereas the Pro version synchronises any date range and costs $25.  According to the SyncMyCal blog, there are plans afoot to release Windows Mobile and Palm versions of the software.

There is also a solution for Mac users on its way.  I spoke about this a little elsewhere.  Spanning Sync looks like a pretty impressive option and I am looking forward to testing the public beta when it is made available.

Tags: google calendar, outlook, synchronisation, syncmycal