Synchronizing Outlook, iPhone and Gmail Contacts
In this vacation I’ve spend more than a day looking for a reliable way of syncing my contacts between Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Gmail (or other Google email accounts). So I decided to share my “synchronizing” experience. Like many of you am currently using Outlook (2007) for storing my >300 contacts. Outlook and iPhone integration works very well and if you are using Exchange you don’t even need to sync again because the latest iPhone firmware (2.2) does this totally transparent. My requirements:
- Folders/Groups – possibility to keep contacts in different folders like Work, Family, Friends,…
- Pictures – I really like to add picture to most of my contacts because it’s more easy to learn who am I corresponding to and also I get free sync of pictures with my iPhone.
Limitations:
- Multiple IM addresses – Outlook does not support multiple IM addresses – you can add only 3 emails and 1 IM address per contact
- Categories/Tags – iPhone doesn’t support them at all. It would be nice if they would add support for them.
First, I’ve tried to find a free (preferably open-source) web based synchronization solution. In the past I’ve used ScheduleWorld and I decided to test the new version but found that they cannot sync contact pictures at all. They are using Funambol client for Outlook but it seams that the picture sync doesn’t work. Other thing I’ve tested and didn’t met my criteria: myFunambol, Zyb.
Warning: Don’t forget to backup all your contacts from Outlook and Gmail before testing anything.gSyncit : Syncing Outlook with Google Contacts & Calendar
After a while I’ve discovered gSyncit – a small, commercial Outlook plugin (only 10$) that is doing the job quite fine. I’ve tested the 20 contacts limited demo and decided that my time values much more than ten bucks and ordered it. By the way, I was interested only about the synchronization of Contacts provided be gSyncIt but it can do also sync Calendar. Now the “review” split into good and bad things ordered by the importance (from my point of view): Good
- Support is amazing: the developer, David Levinson, is giving very good support: it does really give answers and take action when you find a bug. The true it’s that I’ve found some bugs and exchanges some emails with him about them. I was quite pleased.
- Stability: I’ve been starting using it from January 4th (testing several releases) and I didn’t get any crash – ever! From my past experience with Outlook plugins I was expecting crashes and possible slow performance.
- Maintenance: Application is under current development and new versions are appearing every week, with less bugs.
- Does sync photos!
Bad
- Google Contacts API is not quite bug free and they have some notable bugs like: no support for default groups Friends, Family and Co-workers. If you are interested about this please vote here by clicking on the star icon before the bug title.
- No merge features: in case you have a conflict you cannot choose what fields to synchronize. You can only choose one overwrite option or ignore.
- Loose pictures quality but currently I’m waiting for a new release that should solve this issue caused by a Goggle email picture size limitation.
- I still get 3-4 errors syncing >300 contacts:
- errors of type 400 (bad request): only ignore/continue or stop – usually because Gmail does not support all phone types from Outlook
- it does not handle well the case when I move a contact from one folder to another in Outlook.
Overall: I think that very soon this application could become a real success and if it was about giving a score I would give it 90% and I hope that Google will solve it’s issues because the ones from gSyncIt were solved by David in less than 48h.
English
Thanks very much for this article.
I just got an iPhone and have Exchange (work) and Gmail (personal) email accounts. The Exchange account is syncing beautifully, using Active Sync I believe, for email, contacts, and calendar.
iPhone does not sync tasks or notes however, as I’m sure you know.
I was in search of something to do this and stumbled onto this thread.
I also have the contact issue you describe here, so I am thinking of purchasing gsyncit for syncing the gmail contacts, and possibly calendar as well, which would be sweet.
I was hoping for a single tool, however, to handle the Exchange task syncing, AND the gmail contact syncing, but can’t find a single tool that does both. Any ideas? Also, now that Gmail has tasks, could that theoretically sync as well? Is it just too early for the tools to be out to handle this?
Thanks very much!
Ryan
I’ve had great luck with gSyncit as well:
http://lifeandcode.net/2009/09/iphone-gmail-and-exchange-sync-nirvana/
Hi,
tx for this review… I’m about to quit Companionlink for gSyncIt, so I’m pleased to see some good reviews. Companionlink does not give a very good support and is not highly active in the development
It’s a shame..