How to sync calendars between Microsoft 365 and Google

Want to sync calendars between Microsoft 365 and Google? I've had this problem and here's the only solution I've come up with after a lot of searching. It only works with a Windows machine and Microsoft Outlook.

1. Buy OggSync.
2. Install in Outlook.
3. Sync your Outlook calendar with Microsoft 365.
4. Run OggSync. This tool, installed as an add-in for Outlook, will sync your Outlook calendar (which is now pulling from 365) and your Google Calendar.

It works perfectly but it doesn't happen automatically. You have to have Outlook open to produce a sync.

Android vs. Blackberry

I just bought an Android phone, a Nexus S, the "pure" Google phone without the additional skins and features that manufacturers like Motorola bundle in with their Android variants. I'll use it for its hotspot feature, for its seamless integration with my Google accounts, including Google Voice, and for Kindle reading and other functions for which the Android is really just a tiny tablet.

But I've kept my BlackBerry Bold and am surprised at how several applications that ought to be better on the Nexus are so much better on the Bold. This is mostly the challenge of physical keyboard vs. touchscreen. But it's also, I think, that the constraints of the BlackBerry force application developers to hone the functionality they provide.

Take Gmail for example. Google makes for BlackBerry a very nice application that allows you full access to your Gmail. It does need an update for BlackBerry OS 6.0 because the search function display doesn't work correctly. But compared to the native Android application, I find the BlackBerry Gmail application easier to navigate, easier to delete and archive items quickly, easier to see the threads of a conversation, and certainly much easier to use to compose messages.

Foursquare is another example. The ability to quickly check-in to places is much simpler, quicker, easier on the BlackBerry than with the Android app. Of course the Android app looks nicer, but it's not faster to use.

Applications that require scrolling and larger screen real estate, like maps or a browser, are obviously so much better on a touchscreen. But if you use a smartphone for basic business applications requiring accuracy and speed, BlackBerry has perception to counteract not functionality.

Android is to Google Apps and GMail as BlackBerry is to Microsoft Exchange

Forget the whole question of whether Android and BlackBerry can compete with the iPhone around apps. For the business user who primarily uses their smartphone for Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, the question is how easy it is to sync between phone and laptop. Unless RIM (BlackBerry) extricates itself from near monogamy with Microsoft and Microsoft Exchange servers, there's going to be a clear divide: if you have made the switch to Google Apps for Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, you're eventually going to make the switch to Android as well. IF you have a corporate IT department of some sort or use a hosted BlackBerry Enterprise Server, connecting your BlackBerry with your Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks is quite easy. But if you're using Google for these applications, there is no easy and complete solution. Instead, you have to cobble together various components, including Google's sync tool and the special GMail application for BlackBerry. But if you switch to Android, setup and sync with your main business productivity applications couldn't be simpler. Hopefully BlackBerrys will soon be able to sync better with GMail. But if not, any ascendancy of Google Apps is going to eat away at BlackBerry sales. (Same point made by Fred Wilson, AVC.)

I can get a new phone through Verizon in a few months . . . about the same time Google's Nexus One will launch with Verizon . . .

more on the "e-mail dying" meme

There appears to be a bit more content of late in the "e-mail is dying" meme.* Probably this is driven by the Google Wage phenomena which purports to be e-mail as if had been invented today rather than last century. A shift from e-mail being yesterday to other communication tools--Facebook, Twitter and Wave, foremost--is said to be catalyzed by the always on capability of the Internet and handheld devices. The argument goes that the asynchronous nature of e-mail is now outdated, an artifact of a time when the desktop reigned as the hub of our electronic world. Today the desktop is more of a periphery, with the handheld becoming the personal communication device that we live with 24/7. My own BlackBerry barely leaves my body. It charges each night on my nightstand (in the new BlackBerry "bedside" mode). These always on and attached-to-the-body devices allow instant response. As declared in a WSJ article titled Why Email No Longer Rules, "Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging?"

E-mail Fail?

This post is inspired by a recent post by top internet technology venture capitalist Fred Wilson, titled "Email Fail" (LINK).

Basically, as I understand it, he's been struggling for years with an e-mail client that will handle masses of e-mail. Programs such as Outlook, Entourage and the like can't deal with the size of his e-mail archive. Thunderbird choaked. GMail is the answer but he can't get used to the way in which GMail threads all e-mail, without a choice to view e-mail in the more standard way.

I've said this before, but GMail works for me because:

- The threaded conversation interface is a true innovation--get used to it! Having all your e-mail in a conversation, with both the incoming AND outgoing e-mail all pulled together is so much more effective. To me, this is the "killer" feature that prevents me from trying anything else. This design is what truly distinguishes GMail from everything else.

- It can handle a seemingly unlimited amount of e-mail, seemlessly, without choking.

- The search capability is great.

- There are wonderful add-ons like GTD Inbox (LINK)

- It has you tag e-mails instead of putting them in folders allowing any e-mail to exist in multiple places

- Google for Domains provides great, small workgroup e-mail management services

- Being able to have all your e-mail searchable via the BlackBerry GMail client is wonderful (and so what if it's not "push" in the same way that the regular BlackBerry client works--a slight wall against crackberry addiction is ok with me)

- Google's junk mail filter seems to work better than any others

I also occasionally use Thunderbird via IMAP for:

- offline GMail (although I have found the offline GMail function to be perfectly useable)

- as a backup, just on the off chance Google loses all my data

Voicemail transcription compared: Jott vs. Google Voice

Original text:

Brian Sheppard, the computer scientist who created Maven, described Scrabble, in the journal Artificial Intelligence, as "a game of imperfect information with a large branching factor," which means that no one can precisely control or anticipate the changing shape of the word tree.

Jott transcription of voicemail to text:

Brian Shepherd, the computer scientist who created Maven, described Scrabble in the journal, Artificial Intelligence, as a game of imperfect information with a large branching factor, which means that no one can precisely control or anticipate the changing shape of the word tree.

Google Voice transcription of voicemail to text (most significant errors in bold):

brian shepherd the computer scientist to created made and describe scrabble in the journal artificial intelligence at eighteen looking perfect information with the lord ranching factor which means that no one can precisely control or anticipate the changing shape and upward free

GMail nails it. Everyone else is wrong.

I love Microsoft's Vista (hey, it's worked great for me). I like Word. I especially love Excel. OneNote is a little beauty. And even PowerPoint isn't so bad, despite the story that Steve Jobs hated it so much he just had to create Keynote or he was going to refuse to do his Apple keynotes ever again.

But Outlook is simply awful, at least for e-mail.

Searches are excruciating. The thing crashes frequently or hangs up. And there are a limited number of ways that I've found to customize the program--and many of them cost a bunch of money and make the thing even more crash-prone.

As Farhad Manjoo says in a recent Slate piece:

If you're still tied to a desktop app—whether Outlook, the Mac's Mail program, or anything else that sees your local hard drive, rather than a Web server, as its brain—then you're doing it wrong. (LINK)

You are. You're doing it wrong. And I would also sweep into that coffin other online mail systems too, like Windows Live or Yahoo Mail, and even Thunderbird for all you open source aficionados. Two reasons, and now Google has added a third, the final nail.

1. GMail uses tagging, not folders. You don't place a piece of e-mail into a folder to categorize it. You tag it. Which effectively means that any e-mail can be in an infinite number of folders. How can you live with that old way of organizing e-mail, the way that Outlook, Yahoo, every other program that I know uses? And in part because of this tagging, searches for mail have the beauty, speed and simplicity of a Google web search.

2. GMail threads your mail, always, all the time. What's great about that? You see all your mail, both the incoming mail and your responses, as part of a beautifully presented, threaded conversation. And that's what e-mail should be. It's not "messages". It's a conversation, asynchronous to be sure, but still a conversation. Once you've embraced that new reality, any other mail program feels like using a typewriter.

3. The final nail: offline. Google has just announced this week its offline feature, in which you can take your GMail offline from the Web and use it anywhere without an Internet connection, within a browser, just as you would if you were using a program like Outlook or Thunderbird.

The only use I have now for Outlook or Thunderbird--and I use Thunderbird for these purposes--is to backup Google's GMail servers. I am one of perhaps 17 people in the world who actually pay Google $50 a year for the privilege of having an ad-free GMail and with that they have a special up-time guarantee. But still, it makes me nervous that there is no GMail backup and so from time-to-time I'll download a copy of my GMail to Thunderbird so it sits on my computer. But with this final nail in the coffin, I'll probably remember to do that less and less.

PS: I do still use Outlook as a conduit out to my BlackBerry for contacts and calendar, but that's because I have a BlackBerry Enterprise Server that makes such over-the-air sync easy. The only thing that Outlook-BES really provides that can't be found elsewhere is contacts sync from Salesforce through Outlook and out to my BlackBerry. If Google/Salesforce filled that hole with a relatively low-cost option, I'd never have to use Outlook again.

Love Google Chrome; But have to return to Firefox

Love the interface of Google's new Chrome browser. Love the way it creates a semblance of GMail etc. being their own applications (through application shortcuts). Love its speed. Love the tabs. Can't do without Firefox plugins, especially GTDInbox (LINK). So, back to Firefox for now. Some random comments on the subject here, including disturbing privacy/copyright issues:

Internet Duct Tape: LINK

Blog Traffic School: LINK

Google Chrome: Not just another browser

This is a really big deal. Google Chrome's new brower. More thoughts on this later. In the interim, take a look at AVC (LINK) which explains why this is a big deal and at the Google Chrome comic book explanation of why and how the browser works (LINK).

Salesforce and Google contacts sync

I've been experimenting with the newly released sync between Salesforce and Google contacts. Released as a free application accessible even to the lowest Team edition users, Appiro's product (LINK) does a good job in my experience so far. Customization is limited (as is the documentation) but with my Google Apps account the sync both directions works well, with some exceptions.

> Occasionally a contact won't sync. Usually I understand the reason. Sometimes it doesn't make sense. After each sync, if there are exceptions, you get an e-mail with exceptions listed.

> As far as I can tell, it will only sync the main e-mail field. I have multiple e-mail fields set up in both programs, but there's no way to set-up custom field mapping.

I'll provide a more comprehensive report later, but good news is no lost data so far.

(And for BlackBerry users, who are still without an easy OTA sync without use of BES, one nice thing about the Appiro product is that all of your contacts are in this way synced from Salesforce, over to Google and then accessible using the Google Mail application on your BlackBerry. Not the speediest service (though for me a switch to Verizon has made all the difference) but at least you can access them in a pinch. To get my contacts into the regular BlackBerry addressbook, I still occassionally sync one-way from SalesForce to Outlook, and then via cable to the BB.)

(More CRM posts on my personal blog, written before I established this tech blog. LINK)

GTD for GMail

There's a little outfit called Productive Firefox, a one-man shop that produces a very cool add-on for GMail that I can't live without. It's called GTD Inbox. Before you run away saying you've heard enough about Getting Things Done and you're just not competent enough to handle that level of obsessiveness, stay put a minute and listen. Even if you don't swear to the god that is David Allen (LINK), GTD is a wonderful add-on to FireFox and GMail. It creates an intuitive interface to categorize your e-mail and has all sorts of little nifty productivity features, like Hipster Print which takes the most recent 100 items in your inbox (or any set of search results) and prints a summary of these e-mails on one page. Also, the developer is diligent with his updates to the product, which is wonderful to see for a little shop.

Wonderful/Not

What is so wonderful about GMail is that everything is archived and searchable.

What is so not wonderful about the GMail-Salesforce mashup is that . . . it's not.

The GMail to Salesforce function is pretty useless. It only chronicles outgoing e-mail, if you remember to tell it to do so each and every time you send an e-mail or automatically if you initiate the e-mail from within Salesforce. But why would you initiate the e-mail from within Salesforce? GMail isn't integrated into e-mail so you'll naturally be in GMail for e-mail, not in Salesforce. Sure, if you do this chronicling, co-workers will have access to those outgoing e-mails, but CRMs like GoldMine have enabled the chronicling of both incoming AND outgoing e-mail for a decade.

Salesforce is the old topography. GMail, like the rest of Google, relies on tags not containers. Hence, unlimited searching, sorting, organizing. Hopefully this GMail-Salesforce mashup is just the beginning, but otherwise, at least in terms of e-mail, it's doa in mho.

The documents integration is much better, and I'll comment on that in a later post.

Fake Steve is on his game AGAIN

Brilliant work from Fake Steve, cutting me down to size and showing just how marginalized I am in my excitement about GMail + Salesforce. One of many good points:

"[Benioff, CEO of SalesForce] ironically, has built his business around a bloated, overly expensive, outdated business model, a model that comes straight out of the late Nineties -- he's running his own data center, and he's using Sun servers and Oracle software." -- FSJ LINK

Nirvana (I hope): Google Aps and Salesforce

I've been waiting for this for years! I hope it's as good as I hope . . . LINK

MacBook Air NOT a computer for the cloud

It's interesting to me how much the MacBook Air (MBA) is NOT a computer for the cloud.

Cloud computing is of course the Google strategy of having applications live in the cloud, delivered to the user from Google servers via a browser.

The MBA has a key limitation for cloud computing: no built-in cellular modem and not even a slot to insert an external card. For the road warrior or wealthy cafe denizen who relies on cloud applications (like GMail), access to the Internet all the time is essential. A built-in cellular modem or card slot to insert a modem is essential. The MBA can't deliver. It's impossible to rely on Wifi all the time. There just aren't enough open access connections available, and besides, security is a real concern. Watching a friend do a conference call on Skype as we drove into Boston drives this point home.

Apple's strategy continues to be to build desktop applications, rather than cloud applications. Strangely Microsoft's strategy is more like Google's: "Ozzie signals Microsoft's surrender to the cloud" (LINK). Long-term, can Apple really continue to prevail as the last holdout in the desktop wars? Will Microsoft get it together, scrap Vista, and embrace cloud computing with a new, streamlined operating system that's truly tailored to the cloud?

Or maybe the new 3G iPhone will be the sort of cloud computing accessory the MBA requires, with the MBA using it as its access to the cellular-served Internet.

More thoughts from ZDNet here: LINK

And more to the point that Microsoft may be forced to cede market share for desktop software, and by implication play catch-up to Google: LINK

Google Presentations now Export to PPT

I think this is a big deal:

"You can now export a Google Presentation to the PowerPoint (.ppt) file format." Google Aps blog (LINK)

Sometimes the littlest innovation can have big implications.