Sync Your Google Calendar with Outlook

With all the hype from Mix ’08 yesterday about IE8, I completely missed this in the news.  I use both Outlook 2007 and Google Calendar on a regular basis.  I like Google Calendar simply because it’s easy to share, both publicly and privately, calendars with people from all over the world.  For instance, I have a calendar for the Martial Arts school I volunteer for, which allow myself and other instructors to add events to the calendar, and allows students and parents to easily view these events.

Also, just the fact I can view the Google Calendar on any computer is a big plus.  The big downside is that is didn’t sync with Outlook.  What I would find myself doing is manually exporting my Outlook calendars as iCal files, and then importing them into Google Calendar.  Doing that is quite inefficient and really isn’t reliable.  Being that I work on multiple PC’s throughout the day, having my calendars synced is a big priority.

Yesterday, Google introduced Google Calendar Sync.  This is a simple 2-way syncing application that will sync your Google Calendar to Outlook, and vise-versa.  In my brief testing it seems to work very well, but it does have one big downside at this time.  It will only sync your primary Outlook calendar, which really sucks because I have several secondary calendars for work, etc.  Hopefully this will be a feature that will be added soon though.

Link:  Google Calendar Sync