I surrender!
I tried to make Google Calendar work the way I want to work, but it just won’t. Instead of fighting against it, I’m reversing course and doing my best to work with it.
What I Wanted
A little while back, I decided that I needed to start archiving data by year1. I still want it searchable, etc. but I don’t need live sync of my 2004 calendar data to my BlackBerry. As such, I made the choice to create a couple different calendars, and create a new one of each every year.
This is what I wanted. Nice annually archived calendars of home, work, etc. Google Calendar does not agree with me.
Giving in to the Default Calendars
I’ve still got my annual calendars for years prior to 2008, but in 2008 I gave in and started using the Default calendar as my personal calendar for 2008 data. Google wants to do everything in the default calendar and using a different calendar as the primary is death by 1000 paper cuts.
My plan is to export this data at the end of the year and import it into a 2008 archival calendar. I’ve got some basic scripts for this and nearly a year to fix up any minor issues that still remain in them if I need to.
Personal and Google Apps Calendars
At Crowd Favorite we are using Google Apps for our calendaring system. This means I’ve got two different 
Default 
Sync, Alarms and Notifications
With the arrival of Google Sync, my BlackBerry calendar and my Google calendars are wonderfully up-to date with over the air sync. You can even choose which calendars you want to sync. There are, of course, some limitations.
The main limitation is the attaching of alarms to events in the BlackBerry calendar. This happens for the Default calendar in the account you are syncing2, but it does not attach alarms to events in other calendars you are syncing.
The mobile/SMS integration is another issue. Since you can only register your mobile with one of your calendars (regular Google Calendar or Google Apps Calendar), you can only receive SMS notifications and create events via SMS for one calendar or the other.
Here’s my workaround:
I’ve decided to keep my personal Google account as the primary sync account, so I get BlackBerry alarms on my personal appointments and can create personal appointments directly on the BlackBerry.
I then disassociated my mobile from my personal Google account and attached it to my Google Apps account instead. Now I get SMS notifications for my business appointments and I can create business appointments via SMS. These appointments then appear in my BlackBerry calendar with the next OTA sync.
This all works, but I really wish I’d set it up in reverse. Kind of a hassle to change it now, but I probably will at some point.
Desktop Integration
I do enjoy sync vs. subscription, however I’m giving Spanning Sync a little while longer to get the kinks out before I give them another shot. For now, my method of subscribing to my Google Calendars in iCal through my Alarm-It script is working well enough.
Suggestions?
Anyone else have any good tips and tricks I should be considering? The comments are open.
I have been using Plaxo for about 1 years to sync all my machines (MacBook, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini and Acer Windows Laptop). I use it for all my Calendars and Contacts. I also sync it to my Google Calendar for work and personal. I publish my Google Calendar for Carolyn and my family so they can know where I am and what I am up to. I also have a copy of Carolyn’s Google Calendar. The only thing that sucks is that I am using Entourage 2008, so I have to sync with iCal and then sync iCal to Entourage. I am not sure about sync OTA because I am using the iPhone. I am not sure about a BB plugin. I know you ditch Plaxo before but they have improved a lot. Just my thoughts.
Hi,
I just wanted to let you know that you can actually register the same phone number to multiple Google Calendar accounts, i.e., you can set up the same phone number to receive SMS notifications on your work calendar and your personal calendar. The only problem is that you can only use our GVENT service to create events via SMS for one calendar. The events should be created on the last account for which you verified the phone number.
Also, why do you want to segment your calendar by year into multiple calendars instead of keeping them all on one calendar? I’m interested in knowing more about the use case here.
Thanks,
Shirin
Google Calendar Product Manager
Have you tried creating an event through SMS?
I talk about it at my blog but here’s the recap:
You can even add events through SMS. I sent an SMS to 48368 with “Gymnasitcs Saturday 10:00am†and it added the event to my calendar. It even added my default three alarms/reminders.
Shirin–
Thanks for coming by and sharing the information about the SMS notifications. I’d much rather have the calendar alarms on my BlackBerry for all of my calendars, but it’s nice to know the way this works.
I like annual archives of my iCalendars because it makes it easier to do things with the data. For example, I only want to be passing relevant data around to various web services – why make them parse my calendar from 1997-2008 (which I have) when all the relevant stuff is in 2007-2008? I’ve found that annual archives work well for this.
tom–
yep.
I can’t read.
We use zimbra in my office … and everything syncs as a charm, believe it or not: mac, symbian phone, iphone, even my damn vista laptop.
I’ve tried Zimbra – the OTA sync to the BlackBerry is very expensive, and the sync was silently deleting my data (same reason I ditched Plaxo).
I have tried loads of calendar syncing software to sync between outlook/exchange and google calendar – loads! The best one I got to work was SynmyCal and have been using it for at least 6 months now and it really works well. Very flexible. Windows only obviously – maybe they’ll do a mac version?