An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

Lately I have been looking for ways to keep my life better organized as I really am hopeless when it comes to planning things and getting things done so I had a goal to sync all my calendars together so they were available from wherever I wanted them. Seeing how I recently purchased a Treo 750 my first thoughts leaned towards setting up a MS Exchange account online but I just couldn’t bring myself to use Exchange for my personal account as well as at work so next I thought about Google Calendar.

The first step I went through to sync my life with Google Calendar was to use the excellent Spanning Sync to sync my Mac Book Pro’s iCal with my Google Calendar, that then allowed me to use Missing Sync to sync my Treo with my Mac. This kept everything in sync well enough but I only use the Mac when I’m at home and having to connect to it to sync up my calendar was a real pain, this led me to search for alternatives to sync my Google Calendar directly with my Treo over the air….

At first I purchased GooSync as it seemed the better option and the freeware worked fine for me first time where for some reason OggSync didn’t work first go around as the .NET framework failed to install (I suspect that was user error as I think I may have selected the wrong .cab file to download). However I didn’t like the way that GooSync handled my different Google Calendars on my Treo as it simply prefixed the event summary with an abbreviated name of the Google Calendar instead of using categories and plus there was no support for automatic syncing in the background.

That led me to give OggSync another go, this time around ensuring I installed the right version of the .NET framework and with a successful run of using the freeware version I decided to give the commercial version of OggSync a go, which was successful except for an issue with the timezone of one of my calendars in Google Calendar that I had to resolve. OggSync supports the different calendars as they should be handled by using your Google Calendar names as categories and it also supports automatic background syncing to a schedule that you can set yourself.

Needless to say I have canceled my GooSync subscription and have requested a refund as it just didn’t suit my needs where GooSync suits my needs a lot better and I highly recommend it if you want to sync your Windows Mobile based device with your Google Calendar over the air!

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