Google Calendar Sync and CompanionLink for Google Calendar

I am a customer of a tool called CompanionLink for Google which allows me to sync my Outlook/Palm calendar to Google Calendar, so my friends/family can see where I am at any given time.

The cost for their software was relatively cheap, and it appeared to work well. There are some inherent issues and bugs in the tool, which still aren’t resolved, but it does what it claims to do in a very simple and fairly painless way.

Recently I noticed that Google has released their own free tool called “Google Calendar Sync” to do essentially the same thing.

The Google tool doesn’t support as many platforms and PIMs as CompanionLink, but it is free, and it is written/maintained by the people who interface directy with Gmail, so I figured it should work “better”.

I was wrong.

For some reason, both of these tools seem to “ignore” random events on my calendar, while including other random events around the same days and weeks. There is no obvious pattern to why these events are skipped, or why I can’t get them into my Google Calendar.

I’ve exported all of my calendar items to a local file, removed the categories, deleted my local calendar entirely, re-imported all of the events clean and told both tools to do a “Purge and Reload”, pushing everything from my local calendar into Google Calendar.

Nada.

Both tools fail in almost exactly the same way. This leads me to believe something in the way Gmail is accepting the calendar data is causing it to “ignore” some of my events (a few hundred).

So now I’m back to not using either of them, because they can’t do what I need. I’ll probably talk to CompanionLink and see if they have a fix, or can issue me a refund for my purchase price.

Frustrating, since I don’t yet have one unified place for all of my calendaring to go. Grr!

Syndicated 2008-04-28 01:16:42 from random neuron misfires