Migrating calendars and address book to Google

[divestoclimb]

In preparation for my phone, here's how I migrated my iCal personal and Outlook work calendars all to Google Calendar and I'm already happy with the improvement. I also synced my address book up to GMail and it was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

First, I'm an Apple iCal addict with about a dozen different calendars. Some of them were:
Holidays
Social (dinners, dates, parties, concerts, etc.)
SCUBA (my diving events)
Exercise (a way for me to track gym visits)
General Work (work events that happen outside business hours that I have to plan around like trips)

At work I also have an Outlook calendar--doesn't everybody? :/

I found out I can sync Google Calendars to iCal via CalDAV and to Outlook via a desktop app, but there are limitations:

• Google's CalDAV support doesn't support To-Dos (why not, Google??? Hurry up!)
• Google's CalDAV support only supports one calendar per CalDAV account set up. You can add multiple calendars and I did it but it's kinda klugey.
• The Outlook sync will only work with your primary Google Calendar, not any secondary.

...so I had to reorganize my calendars to get everything I needed in Outlook at work on my primary calendar, with everything else I wanted to access on my phone in secondary calendars, but keeping local iCal calendars for to-do categories and the minutiae.

Here's what I set up in Google Calendar:

• My primary calendar is called "Work & Personal." It contains everything from General Work and some things from Social, merged with my Outlook calendar. This calendar has all the major events in my life that I need to track while at work. I was debating putting Holidays in here too but I decided to keep that just in iCal.
• Exercise: moved straight over from iCal.
• SCUBA: moved straight over from iCal. Dive trips, though, also have a corresponding event in "Work & Personal" announcing vacation time for work.
• Social: personal social events that don't belong on my work calendar (parties, dates, etc.)

One more annoyance is iCal can't move an event in a local iCal calendar to one in a CalDAV account--I had to recreate events in the new calendar to move them over! (luckily I didn't have many and I only went back to last month) Outlook syncing went seamlessly after I installed the app at work.

I realized there are a bunch of other benefits to this setup: I'm now sharing my Exercise and SCUBA calendars with my climbing and diving buddies so they can keep track of when/where I'm going. It's also great that I can access my most important items from work, not just my meeting schedule (and I can get to everything important by going online)

My address book was pretty easy after I found this article, lucky me since I own an iPod and the hack worked.

Now if only I had a solution for to-dos...

[snoslicer8]

I'm also an iCal/Address Book Mac addict, and have spent all day on this crap.

There is a software solution (not a cheap one) that I am using the demo of now. It's called SpanningSync, and it syncs both Address Book contacts as well as iCal data to Google Cal and Address Book. It even supports contact photos bi-directionally.

It does NOT require CalDav support to work. Setting it to sync from your Mac actually creates a new Calendar on Google for each Calendar on your iCal. From here, you can copy any events from your Google primary/secondary calendars into the corresponding NEW calendars created on Google by iCal/SpanningSync. Then, deselect the primary calendar so it doesn't show on Google. Now, you have a carbon copy of iCal on your Google Calendar, and it has bi-directional sync.

Hope this helps.