Thank you Spanning Sync!
You’ve finally done what no other app has been able to do until now: keep a Treo, Mac and Google calendar in sync. I’ve had the left half of this equation now for a few months using an app called Missing Sync. Spanning sync just re-opened their public beta this morning and makes the right half of the equation now possible. You need to check out their screencast to understand why this is so huge.
This gives us the capability to overlay our calendars in the office and book events for each other. There has always been the webdav server option which we considered for viewing each other’s calendars but that solution only gives you a one-way export to broadcast iCal to a server. Spanning sync means I can add a meeting via Google, iCal or Treo and it will appear in the other locations. And then I can selectively expose and consume other calendars. They’re bridged silently through the Google Calendar interface but I never have to use the Google interface – I can continue to interact via iCal or my Treo.
This should be good as well for working with external vendors as it lets you expose your calendar at varying degrees with anyone else who has a gmail account. For instance, I can consume a calendar shared with an agent booking engagements on my behalf and have those dates propagate all the way into my Treo. 10min is the shortest interval to sync so unless you’re booking at an insane frequency, there should be little danger of conflicts. This is major as evidenced by the traffic spike that temporarily closed the spanning sync beta this past week. Kudos SpanningSync on wonderful piece of software.
Thanks! We think this approach of using Google Calendar as a universal backbone for synchronization is going to be popular. At least we hope so!
Regards,
Charlie
spanningsync.com
Exchange has had this feature for years!
I have been waiting for this for YEARS!!! and now I dont even have any one to share calendars with :-( . The new killer app for me is, i add a calendar even on my ical or google and it via the internet appear on my phone. No hot sync.
To Dale Fraser, yes but Dale, you would then have to use exchange and well all know what that means….
@Dale – yeah but it only works for people within your organization. You’d have to give your PR firm an outlook account and then expect them to use it instead of being able to share the iCal calendar they already use… plus exchange requires a windows license… plus it crashes… oh yea and it a couple thousand $$ to get an exchange instance… boooooo!
@Benny – as always I will forever be one step behind your technology. Cannot wait til we have the internal Zimbra instance w/ OTA sync for our phones. Where’s our asterisk server yatch!
sean – can you sync two seperate mac computers using this software? Is there another way, such as bluetooth, to do it? I’ve tried to add my two computers to each other in bluetooth, but they will not come up in isync. Annoying.
Michael – I believe MissingSync will allow you to sync 2 macs via bluetooth (though I’ve never done it). You can also get a .Mac account and do it via the internet. MissingSync is $40 and there’s a free trial- .Mac is $100/yr i think.
sean