Syncing Google Calendar with Entourage 2008
Since I’ve made the switch from Thunderbird to Entourage 2008, one of my missing features is the ability to sync with Google calendar.
I tried using Plaxo, but they sync to your main Google calendar and not any others. This may work well if you only have one Google calendar to sync with, but that wasn’t my case.
I thought about some of the tools like Spanning Sync and gSync but Spanning says it doesn’t work right with Entourage and gSync doesn’t say anything. You’d think that since Entourage syncs with iCal, that it wouldn’t be that hard.
So I’ve come up with two work arounds.
- Update my Google Calendar manually with my Entourage 2008 events. Manual I know, but it works.
- Use Sunbird and Provider to sync to the Google calendar to my desktop. Then, once a week or so, select all events in my Sunbird calendar, delete them and import the ics file I export from iCal. This is almost a good solution. Still a bit manual, but you can do multiple calendar events at the same time. The downside here is that Entourage creates items in the ics file that Google and Sunbird don’t understand which cause the import to fail. Google Calendar gives me a error and line number though so I just search for the issue in the ics file and manually fix it.
The conclusion? Nothing that I’ve found automatically syncs well. 
I haven’t tried GCALDaemon yet though. It may be a solution. If you try it, let me know. If you find other solutions, I’m all ears!
I would try setting Entourage to sync events and tasks with iCal (Preferences -> General Preferences -> Sync Services) and then use Spanning Sync to synchronize iCal with Google Calendar.
I’ve been using Spanning Sync (with just iCal and Google Calendar) for a while and it works very well.
- ptackbar February 12th, 2008 at 7:58 am
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12 - Windows XP
You’re right–it should “just work” to set Entourage to sync with iCal and then use Spanning Sync to sync iCal with Google Calendar. However, Entourage 2004 had a bug that could cause database corruption when used in this configuration.
We have several users using Spanning Sync with Entourage 2008 and none of them have yet run into this problem, so hopefully it’s fixed, but we can’t be sure. If you decide to try this, please back up your data first, and let us know how it goes.
Thanks,
Charlie
Spanning Sync
- Charlie Wood February 12th, 2008 at 8:03 am
Safari 523.15 - Mac OS X
Charlie, if everything is fixed with Entourage 2008, I may just purchase it. However, I want to be sure before I do so I think I’ll hold out a bit longer. Is Spanning Sync doing any official testing?
- Thomas February 12th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
OmniWeb - Mac OS X
Thomas,
We haven’t done any testing ourselves against Entourage 2008, but we plan to once we get Spanning Sync v1.2 out the door (which should be very soon). Watch the Spanning Sync Blog (blog.spanningsync.com) for updates.
Thanks,
Charlie
- Charlie Wood February 12th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Safari 523.15 - Mac OS X
Spaning sync, ical and entourage 2008 do not play nice together. The Sync services gets corrupted and then nothing will sync after that. I strongly advise against trying this combination. I have down graded entourage to 2004 (and that was not easy…) and all is well in the Syncing world.
- Paul Barnard February 19th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Safari 523.15 - Mac OS X
Sounds like my manual method is the best bet for now.
- Thomas February 19th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Safari 523.15 - Mac OS X
[...] Syncing up with Google is another issue in itself. [...]
- Entourage 2008 - Quite A Ride - The Google, the Bad and the Ugly | Blog on a Stick February 22nd, 2008 at 1:24 pm
WordPress 2.3.3
I tried the spanning sync to keep google calendars in sync with entourage 2004, via the entourage/ical sync services. It works for awhile, but then things get corrupted. For now I have given up and gave up using entourage calendar in favor of google calendar and ical - for now. The whole reason I use entourage calendar is that I lease an exchange server slot with a service company, keep my data there, and then it gets pushed/sync’d with my windows mobile device automatically, wirelessly, and in real time. Sadly, I have to give that up for now.
- Dan March 8th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Safari 523.15 - Mac OS X
[...] up iCal and it’d ask me which even was right; the one in iCal or Entourage? Then, trying to update my Google calendar online was another issue in [...]
- Top 5 Reasons Why I Dropped Entourage 2008 | Blog on a Stick March 11th, 2008 at 10:24 am
WordPress 2.3.3
Hi Thomas ::
I’m interested to know why you dropped Thunderbird/Sunbird/Lightning in favor of Entourage.
We’ve recently adopted Google Apps at my office, and are thinking of going the other direction so we can have shared calendars on our desktop.
I’m just wishing the folks at Mailplane would add gCal functionality to thier app. I think that would be the killer Mac app!
- Marc Stress March 24th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.12 - Mac OS X
Hi Marc, check out: http://www.twistermc.com/blog/2008/02/04/thunderbird-entourage
Also it’s good to note I came back to Thunderbird.
- Thomas March 27th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Safari 525.13 - Mac OS X