Managing your tasks electronically: part 2 - Synchronizing Calendars

In our previous post, we wrote about convenient new ways to manage our tasks using web2-based applications as a storage and personal computers and smart phones to access them from your desks or on the road.
This post is about the other key personal productivity concept: our calendar. We show here how you can take advantage new web2 tools to keep your calendar consistent and accessible from the office, where you normally use Microsoft Outlook, from your home, where you can use the web or also Outlook and from the road where you can use your smartphone (Iphone for us). This time, the selected web2 services is the one provided by Google.

Google calendar web interface is already very good but is ability to synchronize with the Iphone and Microsoft Outlook are flawless, easy and free.

Let's walk trough the solution.

First, you need to create a Google (gmail) account . Let assume you did this and that you already put some entries in the calendar. Let's say that your calendar look like the following screen-shot:

Now, you can go to your smartphone (Iphone here) and tell the calendar application to synchronize with Google calendar.  A simple setting that you will find in the setting menu.

As soon as you do this, you will see that your calendar in the Iphone has been updated and you will see something like this:

And finally, you can integrate all this with outlook both in the office and home computer. Let's assume you have you outlook agenda in your laptop or desktop.
In order to synchronize the outlook with google you will install the google provided synchronization application that you can found at

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955


After you download and installed the synchronization program you will see a configuration window like this:

Enter you Google account and password and your are all set. You can also specify a synchronization frequency, the default 2 hours may be to long. I use 5 minutes.
After the installation finishes, You will see a little icon on your desktop tray.

If you do not want to wait until the next refresh cycle, just right click and selec "sync" for a manual syncronization.
After you do that and the process finishes, you will see something like this on Outlook2003, the one we use at home:

And of course, this also work for outlook 2007, the one we use at the office:

Ok, end of post. You got your calendar everywhere.
Now, you may, ask: Can I also see my tasks from Toodledo in Outlook?.
Ok, the answer for that will be in the next post :).

Regards, Pablo.