Google Calendar and Outlook Synchronization from Google

Google launched a synchronization tool this week that allows one-way and two-way syncing with Outlook on Windows machines (where is the Mac version for Entourage or iCal?). This looked to be the holy grail of my synchronization…but alas it is nothing more than a gilded goblet.

I currently run Outlook 2003 at work, iCal at home and on my iPhone. I manually sync my work calendar to Gcal and then use the iCal feeds Google generates to sync to my Mac and iCal. iTunes then picks up the iCal entries and syncs them to my iPhone so I am always ready to go.

This tool should allow me to no longer manually sync work to Google, but it has two major drawbacks:

1. It only syncs Outlook events I schedule, so all the meetings that people set up that I need to attend I still have to manually sync.
2. It only syncs the primary Google calendar. I have 11 calendars I use. One for home events, like kids activities. One each for bills, birthdays, weekly menus, paydays (I can separate income from expense this way), work (now), work sync, and several public calendars including Christian, Jewish and US holidays. While I wouldn’t mind if the public calendars don’t get synced, I should at least be able to sync calendars I make like my Home one.

I am rather disappointed with this first release as it really doesn’t achieve much in the way of getting things done and staying organized. I still don’t know how the Google accepting other calendar invitations piece works which of course could alleviate this whole mess as well.