To move your devices into the modern age of electronics, it’s ideal to have them sync between a central location, creating what could be labeled as a cloud. In doing this, you essentially back up all of your contacts and calendar events.
Some phones have other things like notes, or tasks, but these cause some confusion between programs and applications, so sometimes it’s better to not automate these things. However, if you want to, the steps will be the same if it will not give you errors.
So, setting this up is a fairly interesting task, but once it’s set up, you’ll be happy it’s done.
First off, we’ll sync Microsoft Outlook with Gmail. As noted earlier, we are only going to sync the calendar and contacts. To do this, I’ve found the handy program called CompanionLink.
For myself, I’m trying to avoid my dependence on Microsoft products, particularly Outlook. Because of this, Google seemed like a great option considering how nicely they synch with Android devices, which may be in the future for me. So, I had no problem using the 14 day trial. But this is an aside.
NOTE: To ensure that your contacts and calendars stay nice and tidy, it would be wise right now to clean them all up, removing any random or duplicated contacts on your phone, Outlook, and Google contacts.
Device You Want To Sync With
So we’ve downloaded and installed CompanionLink. The program will first ask you what device you want to sync with. Depending on the version you get, it will be presented to you differently, but this is where you choose Google.
You then need to input the settings for your google account:
- email (eg: user@gmail.com)
- password
- calendar (default calendar, unless you have another)
- use HTTPS connection
Select PC or web database
When CompanionLink asks you to select the PC or web database you would like to use, we are selecting Microsoft Outlook here.
If you click on the settings, you will want to select which items to sync, and how to do the syncing. Because we’ve already cleaned up the contacts in both Outlook and Gmail, it should be safe to select sync both ways for both the Calendar and Contacts.
Syncronize!
Make sure to click sync now, to let it do it’s thing. The first time you do this, it might ask you to sign into gmail. Enter your email and password for the account you will be using for this.
The program should run through things, and do it’s stuff. Badabing, badabang.
It’d be smart to once again go through the contacts to make sure that they are all in order still.
ActiveSync
Now we’ll sync your Windows Mobile phone with Gmail. If you’re trying to be like me and lose your dependence on Microsoft Office, this will be the only syncing you’ll be doing from now on.
Open ActiveSync, and select menu -> configure server. We will now tell ActiveSync which gmail account to sync to, and give it the proper credentials:
- email address: (user@gmail.com)
- server address: (m.google.com) select this server requires an encrypted (SSL) connection
- username: (user@gmail.com)
- password (save password)
Finally, select which items you will want to sync, as per this tutorial, we’re only syncing Contacts and Calendar.
NOTE: If you’re concerned that you’ll lose all your contacts on your phone, or that all the proper contacts are now going to be lost on gmail that you just put on there from Outlook, from the main screen go into menu -> options and select microsoft exchange (the gmail account you just configured) then click settings (which is the exact point you should be at just before reading this note) and select menu -> advanced. In here, you can choose how you want conflicts to be treated.
Syncronize!
Everything should be setup now, so click the sync button.
If there are any errors, they should show up in the view status link at the bottom of the main screen in ActiveSync.
note: I had a few complications when I was trying to sync ActiveSync and Gmail with my tasks. To avoid this error, I just turned off tasks.
Hope this helps you jump into a cloud situation, or at least migrate from a Microsoft based syncronization to a Google/Android based sync!
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