Quickbitz – Outlook 2011 cost and Adobe shenanigans

How much is Outlook 2011 going to cost you?

Outlook 2011 calendar on the Mac

As someone who has to use Microsoft Office extensively at work, I tend to take more than a passing interest in what’s on offer in the Mac version. Of course Office 2011 for Mac has been in beta for a while now and I have had a quick look at how its been shaping up, in particular Word and Outlook. First impressions are quite favourable and they’ve certainly done a lot of work. Word looks much more like its Windows counterpart with the ‘ribbon’ although functionally it’s still the poor relation. Whether or not some of the features I find useful in the Windows version (e.g. instant font preview) will make it into the Mac version who knows.

Outlook has also had a serious makeover, although the area that I’m really interested in, namely calendar synchronization, hasn’t yet made it into the beta builds (Contacts sync is there though). I for one will want to see how this shapes up as a lot of people, myself included, will be looking at ways to sync Outlook 2011 with Google Calendar, or even MobileMe and the iPhone. What has come as a bit of a shock though is the cost of Outlook 2011. Today Microsoft announced that Office 2011 will appear around the end of October 2010 and will cost $119 for the ‘Home & Student’ Edition. That’s Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Messenger.. but NO Outlook! If you want Outlook 2011 as well, then you’ll have to stump up another $80 to buy the $199 Office 2011 ‘Home & Business’ Edition (which will doubtless translate into something near £199 in the UK).

For anyone buying Office 2008 after August 1st, you’ll be able to get a free upgrade, but with the email client jumping ship from the ‘Home & Student’ Edition to the ‘Home & Business’ Edition, I wonder how that will work? I.e. Office 2008 Home & Student includes Entourage 2008, but Office 2011 Home & Student does NOT include Outlook 2011. All I can say is that for UK users of Entourage 2008 it looks like it’s gonna cost you a fair bit to get your hands on Outlook 2011. Also, there is no word on upgrade pricing for customers who bought Office 2008 prior to August 1st, and given that they’ve ditched upgrade pricing on the Windows platform, it doesn’t look good for the Microsoft faithful. I purchased Office 2008 Home & Student when I first got my Mac over two years ago, but if I was someone who’d bought Office 2008 just a month or two ago, I would be well miffed.

Will I be upgrading? Well Outlook 2011 would be my main reason for upgrading, but if it’s going to cost me nearly £200 to get it, then most probably not. If I can run a trial when it’s released so that I can explore all the synchronization features (and of course write about it), then I will, but I remain to be convinced that it would be a good use of £200 to upgrade.

Adobe, help yourself

Why is it that these big software companies feel they have some sort of right to take over your Mac? I have moaned in the past how installing Google Chrome allows a background process to run, checking for updates even when the main app you installed (in this case Chrome) isn’t even running? For most developers it’s enough to have a preference setting to check for an update when first launching the app.

Well I have to add Adobe to my list of companies who take the biscuit and try to litter your Mac with things you may not

Adobe Application Manager - never far away

necessarily want. Now there is no doubt that Adobe do make some great products. Photoshop Elements 8, Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5 to name a few, but one of the things that I’ve always had to do the hard way is to edit unwanted objects out of photos. You know how it goes – you take a picture of a beautiful landscape or architectural wonder only to find some person wandering around in the shot. Then it’s down to some deft use of copy/paste to try and remove the offender, which can be incredibly time consuming. So I was pretty excited to see the new ‘content aware fill‘ feature in Photoshop CS5 and decided to download the trial version… all 1.1Gb of it!

First up, Adobe made it pretty clear that I should download and install Akamai Download Manager first. You mean I’ve got to download and install an app just so I can download the app I’m really interested in? Well as it happens you can skip doing this and just download the trial directly, although it’s not so obvious at first glance. Then, having downloaded and installed Photoshop CS5, the first thing it tells me is that Adobe Air needs to be updated. What? Please don’t tell me installing CS5 has installed Adobe AIR?? That is something I don’t want on my Mac. Then it decides that the version of Adobe Bridge that I’ve got installed as part of Elements should be replaced with a new version, although once it’s done that the old version is still there (so I now have Bridge 4 and Bridge 5). Ok so all this I can live with if only to see how this intelligent new fill feature works.

Then as I wake my Mac up this morning, there it is… sitting in the menu bar. Adobe Application Manager! Yes even though I’m not actually running any Adobe apps at this point in time, there’s an Adobe app that’s checking for updates (and telling me that just 24 hours after installing CS5 and a bunch of updates, it needs to apply three more updates). There seems to be some sort of ‘attitude’ with these big companies that says, your Mac is there for us to use as we see fit. If we want to clutter it up with processes… we will. That may not bother many people, but if you’re interested in keeping your Mac running smoothly, then you probably want an idea of what tasks run on it and people like Google and Adobe who ‘do their own thing’ don’t help.

Have to say though, the content aware fill in CS5 is pretty neat. It doesn’t always work as desired but in many cases it does a grand job. Check out the video.

iPad – Little known difference between UK and US…

Since I started using an iPad, one thing has been bugging me – the calendar. More specifically, what is shown as the first day of the week when you have the calendar in week or month view. Being brought up in the UK, for some reason I was always told that Sunday was the first day of the week. So, when I got my shiny new iPad and spotted that the week and month views start on a Monday, I set about trying to find how to change it.

Maybe it’s linked to the fact that my iPad calendar syncs with the one on my Mac via MobileMe? Ok, well in the iCal preferences on the Mac it shows Sunday as the start of the week.

On the Mac, the first day of the week can be set as Sunday

Ok then, well maybe because the sync goes via MobileMe then it’s something to do with the settings on my MobileMe calendar?

MobileMe also lets you start the week on a Sunday

Nope, the settings in MobileMe also show the week as starting on a Sunday. Ok, let’s have a look at the settings on the iPad itself…

No obvious preference setting for the start of the week on the iPad

Ah right, while I was expecting to see an option for setting which day is displayed as the start of the week, but there’s…. nothing. How strange, does Apple let you configure this on other platforms but not on the iPad? Surely not. Well in fact you can configure which day is displayed as the first day of the week in the iPad’s week and month calendar views, but you’ll never guess how it’s done. Give up yet?

Well you have to go into Settings, then select General, then scroll down to International, then finally select Region Format. Next you have to change it from United Kingdom to United States….

Hang on a minute, run that by me again. Set the Region Format on my iPad to United States?? Yup, that’s right. Unfortunately when you do that then lots of other things take on US defaults such as contact details (States, ZIP Codes, a default country of United States), also telephone number and date formats in apps etc. So despite their world class expertise in usability, it looks like Apple have dropped the ball here, and I’ll be hoping that they’ll correct this ‘feature’ in a later release of iOS.

Entourage and Google Calendar, (still) all sync’ed up

Back in late 2008 I wrote a post about how I kept my Entourage and Google calendar in sync using a utility called Calgoo Connect. The process worked really well and the post generated quite a bit of interest from people who were in the same boat. A year and a half later and things have moved on, the most notable change being that Calgoo Connect for the Mac is no longer available. Not to worry though, if you still use Entourage and Google Calendar and you want to keep the two in step, then there s another way to do it using a neat utility called Spanning Sync.

Now the important thing to note here is that what we are doing here is taking your Entourage calendar and your Google calendar and effectively combining them into a single unified calendar. Unlike BusyCal (another great app I use) which lets you publish and subscribe to calendars so you can update them in multiple places, Spanning Sync keeps things neat by letting you ‘merge’ your Google and Entourage calendars into one. It’s actually a lot more powerful than that, but we’ll keep it simple for now. Like before, this method actually uses iCal on your Mac as a ‘conduit’ for the sync process, however you don’t need to be an iCal user of even open it up, except perhaps initially to check that everything is working ok. So, an overview of what  we’re looking at is as follows:

Keeping Entourage and Google Calendar in sync

Basically you keep Entourage and iCal in sync using functionality built in to Entourage itself, then you keep iCal and Google Calendar in sync using Spanning Sync. So how do we do that?

Well the fist step is to configure Entourage to talk to iCal by going in to the Preferences in Entourage and under General Preferences select the Sync Services heading just like in the picture below. Then it’s as simple as ticking the box that says ‘Synchronize events and tasks with iCal and MobileMe’. Don’t worry about MobileMe for now, if you don’t have a MobileMe account it will just be ignored.

Getting Entourage and iCal to talk to each other

Ok at this point your Entourage calendar should be visible within iCal and you can check by launching iCal and under the Calendars heading on the left, make sure there is a check mark against the entry labeled Entourage. You should actually see any entries from your Entourage calendar showing up in your iCal calendar in whatever colour you’ve chosen (mine seems to default to purple). At this point you can forget about iCal and close it down again as the next step is to configure Spanning Sync.

Ok you’ve downloaded and installed Spanning Sync so at this point you need to tell it how to sync the Entourage calendar on your Mac with whichever calendar in Google you have chosen to sync with. Let’s assume you have already set up a Google calendar which you’ve called ‘Entourage’. Open Spanning Sync by going to the Apple menu and choosing System Preferences and then under the Other heading at the bottom of your System Preferences window choosing Spanning Sync. The first thing you need to do is tell Spanning Sync about your Google account by giving it your Google user name and password. Once you’ve done that it will go off and find your Google calendar(s). Now click on the Calendars tab in Spanning Sync and you should see a list of your iCal calendars on the left and your Google calendars on the right.You will see from my example below that I’ve got multiple calendars on both sides, and that my Entourage calendar in Google is actually called ‘Entourage (2)’.

Specifying which calendars to synchronize in Spanning Sync

Tick the box that says Sync Calendars then choose your Entourage calendar under the iCal Calendars heading. Now you can choose which Google calendar you want to synchronize with, so look for your Entourage calendar under the Google Calendars heading and choose that one. You should end up with something like the entry highlighted in blue in the picture above. Remember, because the two calendars you choose to will be synchronized, they effectively become a single calendar (which is actually what you want). Obviously you need to think about any entries you already have in the two calendars.

Spanning Sync gives you a lot of control over how the synchronization takes place. You can sync from your local calendar to Google, from Google to your local calendar or both ways (which is probably what you want). Here you also choose whether you want to sync alarms and items in the past. Once you’ve entered the settings you want, just click the Sync Now button and let Spanning Sync do its stuff. The final step is then to go back to the Account & Schedule tab in Spanning Sync and choose how often you want the calendars to sync, and that’s pretty much it. There are other options in Spanning Sync which you can explore, for example under the Advanced Settings tab you can elect to start over or overwrite one of your calendars if you’re having a problem. Personally I’ve never had to do this as Spanning Sync has just quietly got on with things, but if you do get stuck you can get help from Spanning Sync themselves or on the forum, or even just by Googling your problem.

Ok, the one thing you need to know is that unlike the old Calgoo Connect solution, Spanning Sync is shareware and so needs to be paid for. Essentially it works by registering your Gmail address as being enabled for synchronization and you have a choice of paying $25 annually or making a one-off payment of $65 for life which is what I chose to do (I’m not planning to ditch my Mac or Google calendar any time soon).

There you have it – your Entourage calendar should now be in perfect harmony whether your using it locally in Entourage on your Mac or via a browser in Google calendar. Spanning Sync will do other things, like sync calendars between multiple Macs as well as syncing contacts (although I figure Google knows enough about me already without knowing who all my contacts are as well). Yes there are other tools that may be free or that go about things differently, but Spanning Sync does what it does nicely and has been pretty much ‘set & forget’ for me. I have to admit that I don’t use Entourage 2008 much these days as I’ve gone back to using Mail.app (because of its unified inbox) and BusyCal (which gives you nice features over and above what iCal does), but Spanning Sync still fits in nicely with my BusyCal usage. I’ve also got MobileMe Sync running in the background, so my calendars are everywhere. I can even access my Entourage calendar via CalenGoo on my iPhone 3G!

I’m also hoping for great things when Microsoft release Outlook for the Mac as part of Office 2011 – could that be what makes me switch back to using a Microsoft mail client?

Happy New Year!

Well the last three months got pretty hectic both in and out of work which didn’t leave much time for keeping Macbitz up to date. Nevertheless the Mac world moves on and there’s new Mac hardware and software that I’ve purchased and can bore you all to tears with! I will try and get around to writing up more detailed thoughts and reviews in the coming months, but here’s what I’ve been buying (or had bought for me)…

• A new Panasonic TX-L32V10B 32″ TV. It’s full HD (1080p and 24fps), has an ethernet port in the back but more importantly has a PC socket on the back. What better than to plug my Mac Mini into it!
• An Apple Airport Express which is daisy-chained off my Airport Extreme upstairs in the study so that I can extend the network downstairs.
• A Sony PS3 Slim that can talk to my Mac Pro via a couple of bits of software.
• A copy of Blue Harvest that helped me with a problem with a BMW 120d !? Yes that’s a BMW car/automobile (depending on where you live).
• Socialite – a great client for pulling your social networks (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and other feeds together.
• Busy Cal and Spanning Sync for lots of juicy calendar goodness. That’s seamless calendaring between the Mac, Google and my iPhone with a bit of Entourage thrown in for good measure.
• Songbird is helping to remove some of the frustrations of iTunes. Plus BeaTunes and Song Sergeant have been doing sterling service.
• I’m having fun with a Canon DMC FZ28 camera and a copy of PhotoShop Elements 8 for the Mac.
• Yep is helping me organize all those paper documents I scanned using my ScanSnap S300M.
• Some neat iPhone apps that I actually use.

There’s bound to be other stuff that I’ve forgotten for now, but will dig out and scribble about on MacBitz in the coming weeks and months. So a Happy New Year to everyone and may your ‘twenty ten’ be a good one.  PS – I didn’t even mention the rumoured Apple Tablet once…. doh, I just did!

Entourage 3-way sync with MobileMe

3-way, easy peasy

So someone asked – how about doing a 3-way sync between Entourage on a Macbook Pro, Entourage on an iMac and iCal on the iPhone? Well I’ll try anything once, though in may case it’s a Mac Pro, a Mac Mini and my iPhone. Sure I’d love a new unibody Macbook Pro 17″ but I just couldn’t justify the expense… oh and I can’t afford it right now!

2-way syncing was already working between my Mac Pro and the iPhone, so it was simply a case of adding the Mac Mini to the mix. At this point I wasn’t using iCal, Entourage or MobileMe on the Mac Mini as it’s currently my ‘server’ in the loft. Still, the joys of screen sharing under OS X make this an easy thing to set up without actually having to climb into the loft, so I did the following on the Mac Mini.

1. Open System Preferences
2. Open the MobileMe PrefPane
3. Entered the same .mac account details I currently use on my iPhone and Mac Pro
4. Selected ‘manual’ sync
5. Selected just Calendar
6. Clicked the Sync button

As this was the first time I’d synced the Mac Mini using MobileMe it popped up a warning, asking me if I wanted to merge events or replace them either on the Mac or on MobileMe. Obviously at this point I chose to ‘Replace data on computer‘ to make sure all the events I already had would be pushed on to the Mac Mini. That was it. After a couple of minutes I was looking at an exact replica of my calendar in iCal. Next I installed Office 2008 on the Mac Mini, and patched it up to the latest level (12.1.5). I then launched Entourage on the Mac Mini and in its Preferences I told it to sync via iCal. A couple more minutes and sure enough the Entourage calendar events from my Mac Pro/iPhone were showing on the Mac Mini. Having tested it works ok it would just be a case of setting the sync in MobileMe preferences to ‘automatic’.

Obviously the same limitations apply as I’ve mentioned in earlier articles, ie because you have to sync Entourage via iCal and MobileMe, you are limited to calendar features that they both understand, so ‘categories’ are out. Still, it works well enough.

I’m sure it would be pretty straightforward to add another Mac with either iCal or Entourage, or even a Windows PC running Outlook to this little arrangement (the key is in using the same MobileMe account). Trouble is, my life is complicated enough already!

iCal and Google Calendar getting snug… again

Mail, calendars and ToDo lists on the Mac seem to be becoming a hobby of mine, and thanks to the latest release of Calaboration (their spelling not mine!), there’s yet another way for Mac users to spread around some calendar goodness. Calaboration is the latest way for iCal users to view and edit one or more of their Google calendars from within iCal itself. Unfortunately Entourage is left whimpering outside in the cold in this episode (but for that there are other solutions).

Downloading and installing Calaboration is a simple affair, just go to the Google website, download it, unzip it and drag it into your Applications or Applications/Utilities folder. Something you’ll notice is that every time you run Calaboration you’ll be prompted for your Google username and password because unlike other utilities such as Google’s Gmail Notifier, Calaboration doesn’t seem to cache your credentials. Not really a problem as this is pretty much a ‘set it & forget it’ application anyway.

Once you’ve entered your details you’ll be presented with a list of your Google calandars and it’s simply a matter of ticking the ones you want to be accessible in iCal. Given that I’ve already been using Calgoo Connect to sync iCal with Google calendar I decided it was safest to create a new calendar in Google specifically for the purposes of trying this out. So I created a Google calendar called ‘Google Only’ and selected it in Calaboration as the calendar I was to access from iCal. One final step you need to do is to open Calaboration’s Preferences and tick the box that says Enable read-only calendars. It’s a way of getting round the permissions set in gCal thereby allowing you to add, edit and delete gCal entries in iCal. If you don’t tick the box then any changes made in iCal will generate an error.

Creating an event in Google calendar

When is a meeting not a meeting?

So let’s try it out… I’ve run Calaboration and told iCal which Google calendar I want access to and now I have a Google heading in the iCal sidebar with ‘Google Only’ in it. I pop over to Google and create a new all day event in my ‘Google Only’ calendar. Going back to iCal I right-click on the ‘Google Only’ calendar heading and select Refresh and sure enough the new event is visible in iCal. So far so good. Next test is to edit the event in iCal and see what Google makes of it so I select the all day Google calendar event and decide to give it a start and finish time then save it. That goes off without a hitch but on syncing the event back to Google, it now decides that it’s a meeting invitation, putting a little question mark icon to the left of the event heading. It’s simple enough to get rid of this by opening the event in iCal and where it says ‘Are you coming‘ over on the right, just click Yes and save the event.

Creating a new gCal event in iCal
Creating a new event in iCal to go in your Google calendar is again pretty straightforward except you need select your Google calendar first in iCal’s sidebar before creating the event. This is because your Google calendar won’t show up in the pick-list of calendars when actually editing the event – that’s just the way it works. Again, once you’ve created the event in iCal and have let it sync, the event pops up in Google complete with the correct start time if you specified one. If you edit the event in iCal and change it from an all day event to one with a start time, then the quirk of it turning into a meeting invite happens again. The work around is the same as before, open the event in gCal and edit it to say you’re attending.

I tried creating, editing and deleting events in either iCal or gCal and apart from the quirk mentioned above, it all seemed to work well. If for example you add text to the Notes field in iCal, this will appear in the description field in Google. It also looks like you could add a location to the event in iCal and have it appear in Google Maps when you open it in Google calendar, although I didn’t investigate this option fully. One thing that doesn’t seem to get carried across is alarms. Despite setting a reminder in Google, or setting an alarm in iCal, that feature wouldn’t make it through to the other platform. Not a showstopper but a pain if like me you’re incredibly forgetful!

So, does Calaboration replace what Calgoo Connect does? Well no not really. You see Calaboration is a way of pulling one or more of your Google calendars through in to iCal and allowing you to edit those calendars on either platform. This means that your Google calendars appear in iCal in addition to any existing iCal calendars you might already have. So if all you have when you start is your default iCal calendar and your default Google calendar, then after setting up Calaboration you’ll still only see your default calendar in Google, but you’ll see both calendars in iCal.

Calgoo Connect on the other hand is about pairing calendars between iCal and Google, so in the same scenario you would choose to pair your default calendar on each platform meaning you have just one intergrated calendar that you can update in either location.

Which option is better? Well both are free and it’s horses for courses really, so it depends on whether you want multiple calendars or not. You might for example already use Google calendar for work and have iCal at home keeping track of your social life. If you want to keep these as two discrete calendars and to be able to see and edit your work calendar at home, then Calaboration will do that for you. If however you wanted just one combined work/social calendar that you update using either Google at work or iCal at home, then Calgoo Connect would be the way to go. Similarly, if you’re an Entourage user then Calaboration isn’t going to be much help because the Google calendars you add to iCal with it aren’t visible in Entourage – for that we need a patch from Microsoft that allows syncing of more than one calendar between Entourage and iCal. Another downside of Calaboration is that calendars it adds to iCal aren’t visible on the iPhone if you’re using MobileMe.

Now if only Apple would update iCal with some of Entourage’s features (categories in calendars, a decent ToDo List function… that syncs with the iPhone) then I’d be a happy man.

Entourage and Google Calendar, all sync’ed up

UPDATE 25/May/10 – Unfortunately since I wrote this article, Calgoo no longer offer the Calgoo Connect utility. I have now written a new article on how to use Spanning Sync to keep Entourage and Google in sync. You can find the new article HERE.

UPDATE 19/Oct/09 – To all the people who have upgraded to Snow Leopard, which causes Calgoo Connect to break. The problem appears to relate to a difference between the version of Java that ships with Snow Leopard and the version of Java that Calgoo Connect expects. Calgoo have not yet responded with a Snow Leopard compatible version of Connect, but there does appear to be a workaround which is to install an earlier version of Java. I will investigate this and post a ‘how to’ in a separate article (if I can make it work!)

In the meantime, there’s a very good article here that tells you how to install the Leopard version of Java if you want to give it a try.

– – – – – – –

The following is a short walkthrough I’ve made in response to a question someone raised about being able to sync Entourage with Google calendar, the idea being that if you use Entourage at work you can post a calendar entry there and then view it on gCal when you get home (and vice versa).

The short answer is ‘yes’ and all you need is Calgoo Connect (currently v2.1.3) which you can download from the Calgoo website (you’ll need to register for the download, but it’s FREE). The long and boring answer is as follows…

Ok, we’ll assume you’ve already downloaded and installed Calgoo Connect on the Mac where you’ve got Entourage installed. Now the thing to remember here is that you’ll actually be using iCal on the same Mac as a ‘conduit’ for getting Entourage and gCal to talk with each other. Doesn’t mean you need to be an iCal user, just so long as it’s in the background doing it’s thing. This is what you need to do.

1. Open Entourage and go to Preferences. From the preferences list choose Sync Services and make sure you have the option to ‘Synchronize events and tasks with iCal and .Mac‘ ticked. This will automatically create an Entourage calendar inside iCal. You can easily test this bit by creating a calendar entry in Entourage then opening iCal and checking that your new entry appears in the Entourage calendar under iCal. (Don’t worry if you don’t have a .Mac account, that bit is ignored if you don’t have one).
2. Next, you need to decide which of your gCal calendars you want to sync Entourage with (that’s if you have more than one gCal calendar). For the purposes of making this article clearer, I created a gCal calendar called Entourage, alongside my default calendar.
3. Ok, launch CalGoo Connect and click on the little icon bottom left that looks like a purple and an orange arrow on top of a calendar.
4. Chose what sort of connector you want to create, in this case it’ll be ‘Sync an Apple iCal Calendar with a Google Calendar‘.
5. Give your new connector a name. I called mine ‘iCal <-> gCal’ but beware that special characters like ‘<‘ aren’t actually a good idea as they get mangled when Calgoo displays them back to you. (Bug?). A better name might be ‘iCal – gCal’.
6. Now you’ll be prompted for which iCal calendar you want to sync. This is where you’ll want to specify your Entourage calendar in iCal.
7. Then you’re asked to supply your Google Mail credentials so that Calgoo Connect can access your calendar(s) to see what’s there (and do the sync’ing).
8. Once you’ve done that you should see a window asking you which Google calendar you want to sync with. Again in my case I chose the calendar in Google that I’d specially created for sync’ing with Entourage, but you could just as easily use your default Google calendar for example.
9. Now you’ll get a confirmation window that summarizes what you’ve chosen. If you’re happy just click the ‘Next’ button.
10. The last step lets you do a sync straight away or just save the connector for later use (or modify the connector).

And that is pretty much that. As you’ll see from the gallery below, I tested this out by creating a new calendar entry in Entourage which, after sync’ing using Calgoo Connect, appeared in Google calendar – and it works both ways so you can create something in gCal and it’ll sync across to Entourage. Of course you can set Calgoo Connect to sync automatically at a particular interval, e.g. every hour.

So next time you need to need to type something into Entourage and see it appear in gCal, this will do the trick. Alternatively, if the other half nags you to book a day off so you can go shopping for shoes with her, you can create a reminder for yourself in gCal at home and it’ll pop up in your Entourage calendar at work (or wherever) so that you can then plead with your boss for some time off… or not, as the case may be! 😉

The day my calendar died…

Following on from my foolish attempt to get my Entourage calendar synchronized with my Outlook/Notes calendars via Google calendar, I am pleased to report that the whole misguided affair managed to screw up my calendar completely!

It is fair to say that this might have been the result of my understanding the options shown in the CalGoo Connector. You see one of the options in CalGoo is to specify over what time period you want to sync events, so for example you can choose to:

• Sync all events
• Sync all future events and only past events going back a week

…and so on. Originally I chose to sync all events and as stated in my earlier post, that resulted in duplicate entries popping up everywhere. So having given that up as a bad bet, I decided to run one last sync but this time choosing the option in CalGoo to only sync events up to one week in the past and all future events. Now read that sentence again…

“sync events up to one week in the past and all future events”

I wasn’t expecting what happened next and that is – “sync events up to one week in the past and all future events AND DELETE ALL EVENTS OLDER THAN ONE WEEK AGO“. That’s right, unfortunately CalGoo didn’t ignore any events older than a week ago as I had hoped, it DELETED them, and just in case, there’s the proof.

To add to my frustration, there’s no CANCEL button in CalGoo like there is in Google Calendar Sync, so I just had to sit there helpless and watch it delete everything older than a week. There they were, gone – Entourage, iCal and Google Calendar were devoid of any events prior to a week ago which, if like me you refer to past events for information, was well… inconvenient to say the least (that wasn’t the actual word I was using at the time!).

Fortunately I had my Get Out Of Jail Free card, or so I thought. My Outlook 2007 calendar on my PC was still intact, so I switched to my PC and changed the Google Calendar Sync program to do a one-way push of all my Outlook events back to Google. For whatever reason, it decided that wasn’t going to happen and the process sat there attempting to sync for the next few hours with the progress meter stuck on 28%. I cancelled the sync and retried it a couple of times but without any luck.

In the end, I deleted my entire Google calendar and started from scratch doing one final push of my Outlook calendar to Google and it worked! All my events were back, and now Notes, Outlook and Google are all happily synchronizing again. Needless to say my trial version of CalGoo Connector has been switched off for now.

So, if you’re thinking of trying to get Entourage 2008 to play the sync game with Google Calandar, my advice is to make sure you have a safe copy of your calendar somewhere else that you can recover from if everything doesn’t go according to plan. Meanwhile I may be dropping a note to the CalGoo guys to get clarification on the above option and suggesting that they re-word that particular option in their application, or at least pop up a message warning the user that their past is about to be erased if that’s what that option is designed to do.

Entourage 2008 conspires to make me busy!

As if it isn’t bad enough that you’re rushed off your feet with appointments, now I have Entourage 2008 creating them out of thin air!

Ok, to be fair it’s getting a little help, in the shape of iCal, Google Calendar and Calgoo Connect. You see as I’ve mentioned before, my holy grail as far as calendars is concerned is to have each of the various calendars I use in sync. So for me that’s:

• My work calendar, which uses Lotus Notes 8.0 on my laptop.
• My Entourage 2008 calendar on my Mac.
• My Outlook 2007 calendar on my PC, which in turn syncs with…
• The calendar on my Windows Mobile smartphone.

All the time I kept Entourage on my Mac out of the loop, everything was fine and the other three calendars were in step, using Google Calendar as an intermediate step between Notes and Outlook (which are on different machines). So, ever the hopeful, and despite the warnings I’d read from various posts on the web saying it’s a recipe for disaster, I thought “Well how bad can it be?”. Ok, I’ll tell you how bad…

I downloaded a little java program called Calgoo Connect v1.9.0 and set it up to sync iCal on my Mac with my Google calendar. I chose not to use the highly respected Spanning Sync product, only because problems have been reported using it in the gCal-iCal-Entourage scenario, and ever the hopeful I wondered if a different product might be more successful. So, with Entourage 2008 already configured to sync automatically with iCal, it was just a case of installing and setting the new CalGoo connection. Configuring CalGoo Connect was really simple and within moments I was ready to sync. So here goes…

Well you can probably guess from this picture what happened. Instantly, various events were transformed not into duplicates, but QUADruplicates of themselves!! It was the same story in gCal, my calendar was suddenly full of repeat entries! Not to be defeated I thought I would delete all the duplicates from my Google calendar then sync again. Despite doing this, Entourage still managed to duplicate the entries. So, where Spring Bank Holiday appeared 4 times in both gCal and Entourage, I deleted all but one entry in gCal and sync’ed again, only to find it appearing twice in Entourage.

At this point I decided to do a little test. I created a new appointment in Entourage then sync’ed with gCal. Sure enough the new appointment appeared in Google correctly and only once. So far so good. I left it for about 15 minutes then without having changed anything I ran the sync again (the sort of thing that would happen anyway if your sync is done on a schedule). Entourage happily decided to duplicate the new appointment, even though Google was still only showing one occurrence of it.

So where does this leave me? Well my suspicion is that Entourage attaches some data to a particular event that helps it to identify it, and that this data gets stripped off on the trip to Google. This means that when the connector next presents that event to Entourage having found it in Google, this identifying data is missing and Entourage thinking it’s a new appointment, creates the duplicate. The reason I think this is that the date, time and decription of the events are identical and yet Entourage is NOT seeing the entry as a duplicate suggesting that there’s some other matching logic or data that it’s using. Interestingly enough, iCal only shows the item once in this situation (which is correct).

So why isn’t it the fault of the connector, in this case CalGoo Connector? Well the connector is actually speaking to iCal which is simply acting as a proxy for Entourage in this case. I tested this out by creating an event in iCal and sync’ing it with Google calendar, twice. No problem, the iCal entry didn’t get duplicated.

My feeling now is that until someone comes up with a Google calendar connector that connects directly to Entourage 2008 and not via iCal, then this is going to be problematic. I have to wonder whether or not Microsoft are doing all they should be to enable this to happen? If there is other data connected to Entourage calendar entries that needs to be exposed via the relevant API, then let’s hope Microsoft are giving that information out, or are at least aware that there are many Mac users out there who would like to extend the reach of their Entourage 2008 calendar, without ending up booked solid with duplicated appointments to the end of time!

The alternative, which is starting to look more and more appealing, is to ditch the calendar feature of Entourage 2008 altogether and just use Google calendar instead. For corporate users tied to an Exchange server that wouldn’t be an easy choice, but as a ‘personal’ user it’s looking very tempting.