Making Entourage/Exchange and Google Calendar play nice on the iPod Touch
We’ve been experimenting with iPods Touch for librarians here at UH. At the same time we’re in the process of migrating staff to Exchange for email. For me this means Entourage on the Mac. The only problem is I also use Google Calendar to keep track of personal things going on in my life and stuff like my ALA schedule. I want access to both of these things offline since wi-fi isn’t always available. So how do I deal with this? Well, the easiest and most cost effective way is to sync Entourage to iCal, subscribe to the relevant Google calendar in iCal, and then sync these to the iPod.
Its far from perfect because things don’t stay up to date unless you are connecting back to the computer where your Entourage sits regularly. Syncing to Exchange directly works better if you want to keep the calendar stuff the most up to date. However, if you sync to Exchange you can’t have a local copy of Google Calendar. A part of me is interested in the sync functionality that Google makes available, but it seems to be Outlook only. There is also a mobile sync, but I’m terrified to try this out and overwrite my Exchange data on the server. I might test with a blank iPod in the future. Any other Mac iPod Touch/iPhone users out there have suggestions about this?
I sync my itouch calendar directly to google’s exchange gateway; no need for iCal. Of course, I also boycotted my institution’s move to Exchange ;-)
Im having the exact same problem.
If I connect my iPhone to sync with Google’s exchange gateway, then i cant connect to my company’s exchange server and therefore i loose my work calendar and more importantly my work mail.
If I connect to the exchange at work I get my work mail and calendar, but i dont get Google’s calendar, and I cant sync my Google contacts.
If only there was a way to connect Entourage with Google calendar directly without going through iCal….
From what i read, it seems to be a common problem.
No way I know of to do this without iCal yet. Hearing good things about better native Exchange support in iCal and Mail in the next version of the Mac OS (Snow Leopard I think its called). Maybe this will solve the problem. In the meantime, iCal is my intermediary.
You could leave your iPhone/iPod Touch set to sync the calendar via Exchange and then use the Google Mobile app to access your personal calendar via the web browser.
That works great but only if you have internet access. Since I have an iPod Touch and don’t always have access it isn’t a great solution
I don’t know if you’ve found a solution or not, but I came across this post while fishing for a solution of my own.
I’m not syncing my exchange calendar and two google calendars separately.
Exchange is setup as my default, and then I added in my personal google calendar and a subscribed calendar using calDAV, instructions for that are here:
http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=151674
Hope that helps someone!
Sorry, that should read:
I’m NOW syncing my exchange calendar and two google calendars separately.
What I’m doing at the moment is using Google Calendar and Exchange together via iCal. I pull my stuff in separately. It syncs beautifully on my iPod and I can update the information without having to access Google Calendar directly. (http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99358#ical)