Timeshifting Interactive Blog

The calendaring on the iPhone is great; unlike Outlook you don’t have to be at your desk to get reminders of appointments and meetings.  However entering calendar items on the iPhone keyboard is a pain, and the UI doesn’t expose a full range of reminder options, e.g. ‘1 week before’.

Of course one can sync between the two using iTunes, but this is tedious to say the least and not exactly practical if you use your Calendar and To Dos a lot.  The iPhone OS 3.0 introduced Exchange ActiveSync, allowing medium- to enterprise-sized businesses with an Exchange Server installation to do 2-way wireless sync.  For smaller enterprises this may not be an option, even if they have Exchange, due to the increased security concerns of making their mail server internet facing.

It is possible to have 2-way sync without Exchange, by using a Google Calendar as intermediate store and synching both the iPhone and Outlook against that.  Internally we use ‘Google Apps for Business’ for our e-mail, mainly due to the excellent spam filtering, and that also provides calendar accounts.  However any Google calendar account will do.

The process is as follows; as with anything, make sure you have a full backup before you start and that you have synched with iTunes first so both calendars are in sync:

1. Setup a Google Calendar Account
2. Use Google Calendar Sync to synchronize between Outlook 2003 (or newer) and your Google Calendar.†
3. Setup Exchange ActiveSync on your iPhone to sync between the iPhone/iPod Touch and Google calendar

† At the time of writing Google Calendar Sync doesn’t work with Outlook 2010 beta, however it is expected that this will be resolved by the time Office 2010 is released.

Google Calendar Sync

This can be downloaded from the URL below.  The configuration is very simple, just enter the username and password of the Google Calendar you wish to sync to and save.  The program is automatically added to your ‘Startup’ group and will run in the background, synching your calendar every 2 hours by default (this can be changed to any timeframe that suits).  The only caveat is it will only sync your primary calendar, so if you have multiple calendars in Outlook you may wish to consider consolidating those and using Category labels if possible.

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=89955

Exchange ActiveSync for Calendar

Google’s servers now support Exchange ActiveSync communication, which unlike previous calDAV setups support data ‘Push’.  This means that, when Google Calendar Sync updates the Google Calendar online from Outlook, Google’s servers will push the updates down to your device immediately (even if it’s asleep) so reminders work straight away.

1. Open the Settings from the home screen.
2. Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
3. Tap Add Account…
4. Select Microsoft Exchange.

Account Info

• Email: your Google account address (usually somebody@gmail.com) or Google apps email address
• Domain: leave blank
• Username: same as the email field, your Google account address
• Password: your Google account password
• Server: m.google.com
• Choose Accept if the Unable to Verify Certificate dialog appears.

Sync

• Mail: no
• Contacts: no
• Calendars: yes

If you’re just synching calendars as described, the Mail sync options can be ignored and left as the defaults.

Once Exchange ActiveSync is set up your iPhone/iPod Touch and Outlook calendars should automatically stay in sync without intervention on your part.  And best of all, without having to use iTunes.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Information Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.