Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Synchronizing with Google Apps

I've been using Google Calndar Sync for awhile and it's worked really well for me, but a few weeks ago, I struck out to try the new version of Google Apps Sync. I must say, in the few weeks I have been using it, I'm impressed.

Let me start by elaborating on the old standby, but true Google Calendar Sync. I'm still using my Treo 700 Palm smartphone. It be a little outdated, but I'm staunchly rebellious when it comes to parting with a great operating system like Palm, knowing there is really nothing out there quite like it., But I digress. I synchronize my smartphone daily with my Outlook, but I have reserved Outlook for ISP email. So I have my smartphone synchronizing with a few different email addresses, one of which is a Gmail account. So I like synchronizing my calendar from Outlook to my Gmail account. The Google Calendar Sync works great for this. However, it does come with a few warnings. I generally have it syncing only one direction, but you can easily come up with duplicate entries and that can be a headache getting rid of these.

So when I came across the Google Apps Sync recently, I was interested because I had tried them before, but with less than happy results. This time my experience was completely different. This is a great tool. The first thing I noticed was that all my folders that I created for storing my emails automatically were created on my computer after it synchronized with my Google Email. That was was very helpful. In addition, I can go offline and still read emails on my computer, because they were downloaded as well. We don't have an Exchange server at work, but with this app, I'm wondering why we would need it. Google Apps Sync provides everything we would have had with Exchange.

I found this short video online describing how it works in a little more detail. Check it out.





Here's the link for the App: Google App Sync. One thing to note is that it requires a Google Apps Premier Edition or Education Edition account. At Credenda, we have the Education Edition account, so it works for all of out staff and site teachers, who have a Credenda.net email account.

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