I haven’t been thrilled with DAMO / Outlook / MobileMe. It was working for the most part, but I didn’t like having to run Outlook. Also, DAMO seemed to crash every once in a while. And If I didn’t have the right combination of programs running, I’d get weird error messages telling me that my MAPI provider wasn’t running. Like I care.
One of the other guys I work with recently found NuevaSync. Its ability to sync with Google calendar and contacts wirelessly and with push is pretty nice. I don’t know what they’re doing, but it must be running Exchange ActiveSync somehow. So how to get your Notes calendar and contacts over up to Google? Enter CompanionLink for Google. And it works like a charm.
At first, I was still a little annoyed with being required to use another go-between calendar service, but I realized there’s an upside to this. I’ve been looking for a way for my wife to be able to view my work calendar. Syncing it with Google is just the ticket.
Setting up CompanionLink is fairly easy. This page tells you how to get it to run as a scheduled task in Windows. A word to the wise — do not run a manual synchronization with the setup tool while Notes is running.
NuevaSync is a breeze. Just sign up for an account, then follow the directions to set up your phone.
I’ve just started using this, but so far, I’m very impressed. If this continues to work well, I’m going to uninstall DAMO and MobileMe. Besides, I like the $29.95 one time charge for CompanionLink for Google over the $9.99 / month for MobileMe.
October 6, 2008 at 4:14 am
[...] Calendar – CompanionLink / GMail / NuevaSync [...]
October 9, 2008 at 1:06 pm
I have been using CompanionLink for more than 6 months. I used it to move things to Google back when I was on a WM6 phone and knew I would be moving to an iPhone. I was guessing there would be no Notes sync option out of the box.
For the most part it is great, but like most things you use to “sync” Notes calendaring you should really only allow it to push the Notes data to the Google calendar. Especially if you have a lot of “Meeting” entries as opposed to “Appointment” entries. Like every solution I have used over the past 5 years or so to sync my Notes to a PDA or smartphone you will end up with a lot of duplicates and missing calendar entries if you try to set it up to go both ways.
The only combination I have ever used without issue were the EasySync solutions for Palm OS. I’m annoyed by all the browser solutions that IBM is planning and wish they would just put out a new EasySync version for the iPhone.
Great blog, by the way
October 10, 2008 at 3:24 am
@Nolikey — thanks for the comment, and the compliment.
I have to say, I do not create anything in Google Calendar, and very little on the iPhone.
As for IBMs browser-based solutions, they were working on them before the SDK and Exchange ActiveSync came out. No one seems to be talking about why Apple didn’t license the Traveler protocol like they licensed ActiveSync. I’m not getting any answers, anyway (not like anyone needs to answer to me).
Have you played with iNotes Ultralite? It’s really not terrible. It’s not what I want as a final solution, but it’s workable. For right now, I don’t know that my shop is going to be able to offer anything else as an enterprise solution. I just don’t see how we’d be able to manage 100+ people using CompanionLink and IMAP/SMTP. Especially since several of those users do not have PCs (we’re huge users of Citrix and WinTerms).