Google as a platform for synchronization

February 12, 2011, with 0 comments
by admin

You know and probably use Google Mail and Google Calendar. You might even synchronize information from these applications like contacts and appointments to iPhone or another smartphone using Googles really nice Mobile Sync service. This service implements the Exchange Active Sync protocol and thus features push synchronization.

Even if you should not use these Google applications originally, you should consider to give them a shot. Maybe not to use the web interface but rather to use Google as a pure synchronization platform.

If you use Outlook for managing your contacts and appointments, gSyncIt is a really nice shareware you should try. Unfortunately it is not known very well.

The alternative Outlook synchronization solution from Google, Google Calendar Sync, has some serious bugs but is only poorly supported. So I don’t recommend using it.

If you use Thunderbird as a mail client, the nice plugin Zindus is available to synchronize contacts.

Unfortunately, the data formats for contacts do not match 100% but nevertheless: this scenario should work for most use cases.

The ranking for iPhone synchronization imho is:

1. Exchange Active Sync – if available
2. gSyncIt based synchronization as introduced in this post
3. iTunes – really only a fallback solution

A service that builds on Google as a synchronization platform is Rainmaker. It allows to enrich existing contact data using information available on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Aktualisiert am February 12, 2011