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Matteo Corti — Living with iCal
I use my Mac's iCal as my primary calendar with a lot of events back to 1997 and I try to keep it in sync with several other devices and calendars (PDA, mobile phone, Microsoft Exchange at work, my fiancée Google calendar, ...)
As you can imagine given the quantity of events and calendars involved this task is not so easy as it should be.
I list below my setup and comments in the hope that this information can be useful for someone else.
If you have different solutions or useful hints I would be glad to include them (just send me an email).
iCal 
On iCal I have my main calendar with all my life back to 1997: I keep separate calendar for private stuff, work, other people, and reminders.
Since some of the tools have problems with some of my calendars I list them here along with their size to give an idea of the global setup (as of July 2007):
| Calendar | Events | Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 5126 | 3.0MB | Private events |
| Others | 181 | 172KB | Information about other people |
| RPG | 14 | 52KB | Role playing games: imported from Google Calendars |
| Reminder | 17 | 32KB | Alarm entries on the phone (S60 phones do not have remainders) |
| Tentative | 23 | 44KB | Tentative events |
| Unfiled | 39 | 52KB | Events created on the mobile phone agenda which are not yet categorized |
| WAI busy | 40 | 36KB | Busy information for some work colleagues, generated by Groupcal from Microsoft Exchange |
| Work (others) | 10 | 24KB | Work-related events that I do not have to attend (informational) |
| Work | 209 | 696K | Work-related events |
Google Calendar 
I am trying to share my calendars with my girlfriend using Google Calendars. It would also like to be able to access my calendars from everywhere using a web browser.
Pavel and Jim, the developers of gSync sent me a free license to thank me for my debugging (you can take a look at my messages on the gSync support group to have an idea of how much I complained :-) ).
gSync is a nice Mac OS X tool to sync your iCal calendars with Google Calendar. The latest version (1.0.1) is stable and works without big issues. I’m still not able to sync one of my calendars (Home, see above) with is apparently too big for Google.
My setup
- I sync all the calendars in iCal with Google bidirectionally.
What is still missing
- The possibility to limit the range of synced events (as a workaround for the problem of Google not accepting my private home calendar which is too big)
Microsoft Exchange 
At work we use an exchange server to host calendars.
My setup
I am using Groupware Groupcal to:- Sync my iCal work calendar with my standard Exchange calendar
- Get free/busy information for a group of colleagues on iCal
- Publish my personal iCal calendars (e.g., home on exchange as private (not yet working: see below)
What is not working
Although Groupcal has reached version 3.81 (as of September 2007), it is still not completely stable. Since I got it installed I got:- corrupted sync services (workaround/solution)
- disappearing settings: sometimes opening Groupcal all the settings are magically gone
- mixed calendars: I got the main calendar mixed with event from other calendars
- missing free/busy calendars: had to reconfigure them several times
- several software exceptions
What is still missing
- Clean publication of an iCal calendar to exchange marking all the entries as private
.mac 
I use .mac to sync my laptop with my iMac at home.
Problems
Although both Macs use the same system and I sometimes get:- No syncronization: the iMac at home have an outdated calendar
SyncServeruses the whole CPU for a lot of time (hours) with no visible results)- There no Web interface to the calendars on www.mac.com
S60 mobile phone 
I sync my Nokia 6830 with iSync.
What is still missing
- Different categories or calendars on the phone
