Tech @ FuryTech

Recently, I’ve stopped using OsaSync to keep my email synchronized, and moved over to gmail’s IMAP support with Outlook 2010. This made it much easier to synchronize my email, however, there was no way to sync my contacts or calendar items. I did some searches, and turned up gSyncit.

It handles syncing all your calendars and contacts to Google’s Calendar and Contact services, and from there to however many computers you’d like to connect.

It supports multiple calendar support, along with one way or two way syncing,with a whole host of other options. It even supports filters/categories, so you can sync only certain appointments. The same options apply to the contacts as well.

About the only thing that this can’t sync is your Outlook tasks, but that’s cause Google hasn’t opened the API for tasks yet.

It’s only $15 a license, and if you use outlook and gmail, it’s highly recommended. You can get it here.

I’ve been using Outlook since the early days of 2000. I love the program. It’s incredibly powerful, and most of the time, if I can think something up that I’d like to do, it can handle it. There have been a few minor issues, such as no synching of emails, but there were workarounds (Osasync) or different methods (IMAP), but nothing really obnoxious.

Well, with one exception. Outlook gives you the option of assigning categories to calendar items, tasks and contacts. They’re marked with a color, so you can quickly tell what they’re a part of. For the tasks and calendar, the colors are in plain site regardless of the view you choose.

Now, it would make sense that the contacts would work the same way. I mean, in the business card view, there’s that small gray band at the top of each card. But no, there’s no way to see what category the contact is a part of unless you open the contact, which isn’t really great for on-the-fly identification. The closest work around I’ve found is to group by category, but that’s not really suitable for me.

I was hoping that they were going to fix this in Outlook 2010, but as of yet, they’ve not.