Synching Calendars - Revisited

A few months ago, I wrote about my experiences with online calendars, such as those from Google or Yahoo. Back then, I was hoping to eventually get some easy synchronization between Outlook and the online counterpart, other than by export/import. Well, it looks as if shortly after Google announced its calendar, companies started to build just that: Tools for synchronizing Google Calendar with whatever other calendar was used, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Palm, Groupwise or others.

The first one I'll try is CompanionLink for Google Calendar from a company named, well, CompanionLink Software, another "leading developer of data synchronization and contact management solutions for mobile phones, PDAs and other handheld devices." Yawn. They allow downloading a free evaluation software, and so I did. Kinda interesting that you need to download, install and run the application, before they actually tell you that the evaluation is good for 15 days. Would have been nice to mention that somewhere upfront. Installing is easy, customizing too. Simply enter the Google login credentials and select the appropriate calendar application and time period, click Synchronize and wait.... Wait for a looooong time, that is.

While I'm writing this, the little synchie app has been running for over an hour. The status window seems to count calendar entries that it pushes towards Google, but I'm wondering why this is soooooo slooooooow. It's not that a calendar entry is a lot of data. And I'm behind a 6M DSL line. At a count of about 1200, the synch application appeared to have frozen, so I clicked Cancel, however, the little "companion" seemed largely unimpressed by that. A few minutes later, it woke up miraculously and kept counting, all the way to something like 3000 or so, and then the window disappeared. No "Finished" message or anything. Weird. On the Google side, everything seemed to have been captured alright, so I'm happy, sort of. I'll try a few more days and will check on alternatives before I'll consider shelling out $29.95 for the companion, particularly because it's still not ideal. Instead of launching an application everytime I happen to remember synching, I'd much rather have some little agent sitting nicely in the taskbar doing this without any user intervention. Doesn't sound like rocket science to me, that's why I'd expect to find something similar shortly...


Update: Well, there seems to be an issue with using Outlook and the companion at the same time. Apparently, the little helper locks some Outlook files during synchronization, so Outlook itself can't use them. If that is the case, it's very bad application design. However, the error message itself is strange. It says "Another application closed unexpectedly." Maybe that was the effect of the failed Cancel and the window disappearing without any comment. In any case, the application is closed now, right? So why is the message then saying "... until you close all applications currently using it"? I thought everything is closed already. Or did the little companion turn into some locking zombie? In any case, I won't pay anything for this....