a blog on technology in the real world

I have recently moved, and in leaving my job I had to give up Exchange. My setup involves a Mac and an iPhone, so I decided to use this as a chance to give up using Windows as well. I had been using Outlook 2007 instead of Entourage 2008, but after giving Entourage a decent shot I just wasn’t able to be as productive with it. My desired outcome of this project was to use the native applications on OSX and my iPhone, while also syncing the calendar to the “cloud” for web access. I chose Google for the “cloud” part of the project. My e-mail was going to be Gmail, and I had been syncing my calendar from Outlook to Google Calendar for a while now using Google Calendar Sync.

The hardest part of this process was to figure out how to get my addresses out of Exchange and into the Address Book application on my Mac. When you delete the contact syncing on the phone it removes them from the device, so syncing the contacts from the phone into Address Book was out of the question. There’s no good mass “export from outlook” and “import into Address Book” option either. My solution actually came from Entourage, proving that it is actually good for something. Entourage has the ability to sync with the local iApps, and it worked out really well. As you can see you can sync calendars and notes as well, but I only chose the addresses as I didn’t need notes and my calendar was already synced.

For Calendar syncing, I discovered BusySync. It can sync my Google Calendar with iCal, and include the multiple calendars I subscribe to as well. BusySync costs $25, but is well worth it. Updates to any of the calendars are quick as long as it’s running.

If that were all I needed, then I would be done with the only cost being the $25 for BusySync. However, to sync with my iPhone I had to pay for MobileMe. I got it with my new Mac for $79, and you can get it from Amazon at that same price. MobileMe syncs my local addresses and calendars with their servers as well as between their servers and my iPhone. I was hesitant at first after hearing horror stories when it launched, however I haven’t had a single problem with the syncing. Updates are fairly quick from phone to MobileMe, and from MobileMe to iCal.

It is frustrating to have to use two applications to get all my services synced, but in my opinion it’s worth it. I use Thunderbird, iCal, and Address book on my Mac, Gmail and Google Calendar on the web, or my iPhone when I’m running around and everything is up to date.