I get frustrated rather quickly by 5, 6, 12 email long conversations simply trying to find a time to meet sometimes. As such I have been looking to sync my MS Outlook Calendar with something public like Google Calendar for a long time.
Well last night I tried to redo my entire scheduling routine. I figured I would go 100% syncML, a business-style standard fully supported by my phone. I wanted sunbird on my desktop and laptop, google calendar and my phone to all be in sync. The end result: Somehow in the year 2008 such a thing is. not. possible. PERIOD!
Long story short, I did a lot of digging and one of the only things (maybe the) only website I could find which serviced all these clients was scheduleworld.com. An extraordinarily promising website promising to sync everything six ways from Sunday.
Scheduleworld works… ish. I could sync most things some of the time. However, 95% of the time somewhere in the chain a duplicate would be introduced, or something would go missing, or a recurring MWF event would somehow not show up on wednesday etc. In short: It was unpredictable. I spent more than 6 hours tinkering; nada.
Thus I bit the ultimate bullet, and went back to MS Office — which in its own right as a scheduler isn’t so terrible. Its just horribly inoperable with everything else, aka it doesn’t sync with GCal nicely.
However google has introduced a tool to sink a single outlook calendar with GCal. Its primitive. Outlook has folders and such and google will only pick one of them. So I had to basically wipe my ‘main’ calendar and redo it (10th time in the last 2 days…). Anyway, I’m now back with outlook and using Google’s Calendar sync to give you: my public calendar for knowing when I’m available.