Syncing Calendars with Exchange

If you’re using a Microsoft Exchange server to manage your company events, you may want to sync it with your Google Calendar to make work and home life easier (see Chapter 4: “Syncing Other Accounts” for specific instructions on adding an Exchange account). Once added, Exchange events will show up on your tablet’s Calendar app; however, they will not show up on Google Calendar when you use it on the Web.

You can sync your calendars in both places by downloading and installing Google Calendar Sync from Google at http://dl.google.com/googlecalendarsync/GoogleCalendarSync_Installer.exe. At the time of writing, this utility is compatible with Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010. It’s Windows-only and compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. It does not run on 64-bit editions of Windows.

When you install Google Calendar Sync, you can decide if this is a two-way sync, where events are editable in both programs; or a one-way sync, where events are only editable in one program. If you’re using an alternative calendar app like TouchDown, you may want to just sync in one direction to avoid having everything show up twice.

If you’re a Mac user, syncing between Google Calendar and Exchange is trickier. OS 10.5 and higher users can sync between Apple’s calendar program (iCal) and Google Calendar using the CalDAV protocol. However, CalDAV isn’t supported in Office 2011. My personal solution is to sync Exchange events through Android and use iCal on my Mac laptop, which supports both Exchange and Google Calendar syncing.