Outlook Calendar Syncing to iPhone via Google
One thing I’ve been meaning to do for awhile is to get my Outlook calendar synched with my iPhone (actually it’s an iPod Touch, but the distinction isn’t important here). The company I work for uses a fairly standard combination of MS Outlook and Exchange for email and calendaring. That works fine when I’m sitting in front of my work computer, but there are times when I would like to be able to peek at my work calendar without going out to my office. I had a feeling it was possible to make it work, but it wasn’t until today that I finally sat down to make it happen.
Before I describe my somewhat convoluted solution, I should point out that there are some pretty straightforward ways to make this work. First, if I installed iTunes on my work computer and paired my iPhone with that machine I could easily get my Outlook calendar synched every time I docked the phone. This doesn’t really work for me since I already have my phone paired with my Mac.
The other solution would be to get the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync installed on my company’s Exchange server. With that enabled, the iPhone can sync directly with the Exchange server (that feature was introduced with the 2.0 firmware release). Unfortunately, my employer is far too paranoid about security to enable this feature so this isn’t really an option for me either.
Having dismissed the easy solutions, what is left? Why ‘Google’ of course (isn’t that the answer to most questions these days). Turns out that it is pretty easy to sync an Outlook calendar with the Google Calendar application and, with the recent release of the Google Sync, it is pretty easy to sync your Google Calendar with your iPhone. So, the solution is to use Google Calendar as an intermediary between Outlook and the iPhone.
The first step is to make sure that you actually have a Google Calendar. If you have a Gmail account, you have a Google Calendar (look for the Calendar link at the top of the Gmail screen). I’m actually using the calendar associated with my Google Apps account, but this approach will work either way.
Once you’ve verified that you have a Google Calendar, the next step is to get your Outlook data synced with it. This is a simple matter of installing the Google Calendar Sync utility on the machine running Outlook.
When configuring Google Calendar Sync, simply provide the email address and password for your Gmail or Google Apps account and specify the desired sync direction. In my case, I’m only interested in viewing my calendar on the iPhone (not making updates) so I selected the 1-way sync option.
After a few minutes of chugging, you should find that all of your Outlook calendar items are now visible in your Google Calendar as well. The screenshot below shows the Google Calendar view of the same data that’s seen in my Outlook calendar above.
With the Outlook calendar now being mirrored by the Google Calendar, the final step is to get the iPhone to sync with Google Calendar. Luckily, everything you need for this step is already baked into the iPhone (as long as you’re running at least the 2.0 firmware). The steps are laid out pretty clearly in the instructions provided by Google so I’ll only summarize them here:
- Go into the Mail, Contact, Calendars section of the Settings application and click the Add Account… button
- Make sure you select Microsoft Exchange for the account type. It seems totally crazy to me, but Microsoft has apparently licensed the ActiveSync technology to Google and now Google is giving it away for free.
- Enter the username and password for Gmail or Google Apps account and specify m.google.com as the server (note that you can put any value you like in the Email field, it’s not really used for anything)
- At this point, Google only supports contacts and calendars via ActiveSync so you can go ahead and disable the Mail option on the next screen. If you choose to enable contacts syncing, you’ll find that the address book from your Gmail account will get loaded into the Contacts application on the iPhone. I haven’t yet looked at syncing my Outlook contacts with Google so I don’t have a complete Outlook-to-iPhone solution for contacts yet.
Once you have everything configured you can press the Sync button and open your calendar. After a few seconds you should see your iPhone calendar populated with all the data in your Google Calendar. You should check to make sure that Push is enabled on your phone as this will ensure that any changes to your Google Calendar will be immediately synched to the phone. You can find the Push setting under the Fetch New Data section of the Settings application.
Here’s the same data from my Outlook calendar above after propagating to my iPhone.
It’s a little bit of work to get all this set-up, but ideally I won’t ever have to futz with it again – it should just work.
22 Responses to “Outlook Calendar Syncing to iPhone via Google”
Hey Brian,
This was EXTREMELY helpful! Thanks a 10^9 ( a little nerd humor).
Thanks.
Sincerely,
Phil
You have to love those paranoid employers – wouldn’t be so bad if the rest of the IT worked!
Anyway, many thanks for this!
whoop whoop!
I loved my iPhone…. now I am obsessed.
Thanks a lot man, this worked great!!!
Thanks , it solved all my problem due to outlooksyncclient.dll disappear.
Hi there, I was doing this for a little bit and it ended making my Outlook at work extremely, extremely screwy. I was wondering if anyone else has encountered this? At one point, my personal @gmail.com address was being added to all of my @company.com Outlook meeting invites.
In the end, Outlook Calendar wouldn’t let me edit my meeting invites (mind you, this was while I was in MS Outlook Calendar, not trying to do remotely from iPhone).
Have you experienced this glitch at all? My office runs Vista (nightmare) so this may actually be a Vista issue, as it has numerous ones.
Just curious to see how your syncing is working a few months since ou did this.
Thanks!
-M
@Mono, I haven’t experienced any of the problems that you describe. To be clear, I’m only doing a one-way sync (Outlook pushing data to Google) and I haven’t noticed any side effects to me Outlook data at all. I’ll admit that I’m a little scared of the two-way sync — just seems that there is the opportunity for all sorts of problems. Luckily, for the way that I’m using this, one-way sync is just perfect. Good luck.
Brian
Thanks Brian, this is extremely helpful. While most of my Outlook items get synced with Google Calendar, there are a few items (e.g. Tentatively accepted items and ones that are schedule in the evening hours) that dont get synced. Does anybody else have the same problem? If yes, were they able to figure out how to fix it?
My Iphone Calendar has a Home Calendar option, which is where I have all my personal appts. It also has a Work Calendar option which is the one that I want to sync with my Microsoft Office Outlook Calendar. As we were setting this up, we didn’t see how to choose one Iphone calendar option over the other. Because I can’t afford to lose everything on my Home Calendar I am hoping there’s a way to do this w/out having to first enter everthing on my Microsoft Office Outlook Calendar. Thanks much.
That would be an awesome answer but my employer is so paranoid, I am not allowed to install anything. *crosses eyes*
You can also just sync up with google calandars from outlook and then download the new google app for iphone and access the cal from there. That’s what I had to do since I already had my work email account set up for my iphone but cal did not sync.
genius. thank you!
Hi, I was trying this but 75% of my appointments does not get into google calendar. Mainly the one I didn’t create, but was invited to. Anyone had the same problem ? If so, what’s then workaround ?
Thanks
G
This works great but for rare exception.
Everything I put on my iPhone calendar pops up on my Outlook calendar. 95% of what is on my Outlook calendar makes it to my Google calendar and therefore my iPhone calendar). The few that don’t are repeating appointments, but most of my repeating appointments make to to my Google calendar with no issues. Some of the missing appointments were created by me and some not by me. I don’t seem to be able to find a common thread.
As others have asked… Has anyone else found what the cause is and/or how to fix it?
Thanks,
Stephen
Hey Brian, these is the solution i’ve been searching for.
I’m working in the same paranoid company, these IT guys are sow funny.
I have problems with recurring appointments, they don’t sync to google, do you know why?
Best Regards from Argentina
Matias
Hi Brian, Thanks for all these solutions for all of us at the same paranoid company! Is it possible to sync the work calendar with the google calendar and also to a personal Outlook calendar on the same system that you sync your iPhone with? Just trying to get both the work and personal calendars synced on the iPhone. Thoughts?
Well – my employer will not allow us to run GoogleSync, so I can’t figure out what to do…..
Thanks from another 3 employees of your favourite paranoid IT products and service company who can now access their calendars on their iPhones!
Thanks Brian. This was really helpful.
Working decided only on one way sync. Thank you
I have been having problems syncing my calendar with my iPhone ever since the latest version of iTunes came out (9.1.1.12).
I have tried every possible solution to the problem (even the ones Apple recommend) and nothing has worked.
Whilst not curing the problem, this is a great work around and will do for now, until Apple sort out the problem!
Thanks so much for giving me my calendar back.
Thanks very much mate, a very worthwhile write-up. As the last poster says, although you would think that Apple would have sorted it out to sync through iTunes, this is a very easy and, so far reliable (for the last 20 minutes anyway) way of getting my calender back on my iPhone.
Thanks again.
Leave a Reply