1 iPhone, 2 (potentially 3) Macs......& Google Apps Sync?

Question

Currently I use a beast of a G5 Mac at work for all my software/web development, an iMac G5 at home for personal use & a MacBook Pro for when i'm on the go.

At work we make heavy use of all the Google Apps features such as calendar & docs etc. We all have an address book (local mac application) that gets synced with a list of contacts stored on our mail server. I want to be able to integrate the Google Apps calendar with my iPhone calendar (or even just iCal - which i can then sync to the iPhone).

Essentially I want all three Macs to have the Google calendar synced to their version of iCal including the iPhone.

I've heard that Google Sync handles something along these lines but i'm unsure if it's going to fulfill my needs?

I'm trying my best to avoid having to use MobileMe.....

Help greatly appreciated,

Kind regards

Answer 1

Google Sync will certainly let you sync your Google calendar with your iPhone. Create an account as if it were an Exchange Server, following these instructions. Note that any calendar entries you have on your iPhone will either be deleted or kept but not synchronized, depending on which option you pick.

If you don't want to use the Exchange/ActiveSync route, you could also sync using CalDAV, following these instructions. In particular, we see people using CalDAV if they've already got an Exchange account set up. (The iPhone only lets you have one.) Note that on the iPhone, you can synchronize multiple Google calendars, so long as the same account has access to all of them.

On the non-iPhones, you can just use iCal sync.

If you're syncing your iPhone using either of these options, you should avoid also syncing it with iCal directly. Basically you should have one canonical source (e.g. Google Calendar) and get everything to sync with that. Other options cause pain ;)

Of course if you've got your contacts in Google as well, you can use the same account to synchronize those with the iPhone too, but it sounds like that may not be necessary for you.

Answer 2

Try Calgoo Connect. Another option might be Spanning Sync. These will sync your computers. Once they are in sync, just sync your iPhone with whichever computer you usually do and that will then get the calendars you specify.

I was looking for an option to sync iCal, gCal and Outlook, and Calgoo worked for this. And it's free. Spanning Sync has been around longer, but is not free.

Answer 3

To sync iCal with Google Calendars follow these steps:

1. Go to your Google Calendar page.
2. Go to the settings of the calendar you want to sync.
3. Look for the small green "ical" button, and click it.
4. Copy the link it will give you.
5. Open iCal and choose "Subscribe" from the "Calendar" menu in the menu bar.
6. Paste the link there and fine tune the other settings.

That should sync it with iCal.