Orange Trek

Something I stumbled on yet again. Google has excellent synchronization for corporate email / productivity packages. under the Google Apps banner. I’ve used Google Apps for years. Since it’s inception, really. As soon as it was made available. There are plenty of problems with Google Apps. Sharing calendars outside of your Apps domain isn’t easy at times. It’s practically impossible to use Google Apps with App Engine as links in the App Engine UI will send you to a standard GMail account. I had to email Google to “verify” my apps to become usable.

The biggest stumble, though, is configuring multiple Google Calendars with your iPhone. When you configure your calendar in a Google Apps account you can choose to share your calendar or use a calendar someone shares with you. This is what my wife and I use to notify each other of events and keep on the same page of what’s coming up. It’s like a 21st century whiteboard for us to keep in sync with what the family is doing.

The problem is that once you setup sharing and setup Exchange sync with your calendars you’ll find there is only one calendar. No directions on how to add more. Click the “Calendars” on your iPhone and you simply see the one calendar that’s primary to your apps account. So where next? Well, you search if you haven’t already given up by now and eventually you stumble on this gem.

In regular GMail with shared calendars you have to open Safari (not terribly intuitive, Apple) and navigate to m.google.com/sync. Here you’ll see a list of times you’ve configured exchange with any phone attached to your cell phone number. For Google Apps’ users, however, the answer is more complicated. If you use or have used GMail in the past you’ll see a list of phones and dates and won’t see the most recent addition.

So you follow the instructions here.

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=139206

Basically what this amounts to is you see the list of phones you may have synced, you click the link saying your an Apps user (off screen generally at the bottom). You login as your Apps account, you click a sync icon at the top of the page and then you see another screen like you first saw at m.google.com/sync. Here you can finally choose to add your co-worker’s, family member’s calendar. It’s not over, though.

Now you need to go back into the phone Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendars->Accounts->Exchange and turn the calendar off. Let it remove the calendar from your phone. Once that’s done turn it back on and open the Calendar app on the phone. Now if you go back to “calendars” in the upper left corner you should see the shared calendar(s) in addition to your own. Select the shared calendars and finally you’ve reached home.

As slick as the iPhone is and as slick as Google’s offerings are, it’s hard not to think there is a better way to do this. Hopefully this helps someone stumbling for a solution to this.

Wanted to add some filler so this didn’t look completely like a fresh WordPress blog. I’ve never been a big blogger, but I’ve been fairly active on message boards, IRC, etc. talking about the things that interest me. From tech to programming to gadgets to hobbies. Well, this is my attempt at finally setting up a site to do brain dumps as I get deeper into learning HTML5 and doing mobile development in general. To be continued.