OTA sync with Google Calendar - PinStack.com

braz · 08:47 PM

I wanted to share this with people here at pinstack. I was on a mission to have my Google Calendar sync via OTA. Since I am not on a BES I was looking for a free or low cost option to do this. I have seen other app that never really worked and thought I would begin to search for something else.

Well I am pleased to say that I came accross this app called Calendar Share from www.saraiya.com. Now let me first start off by saying I dont know this company. I am no way connected to them. I just wanted to pass on something that seems to be working great for me, atleast for the last few days as I'm still running the demo.

Here is a brief quote from their site:

CalendarShare for Partners and Secretaries
Share your handheld's calendar with your spouse, your secretary, your colleagues or your friends over the air for a one-time charge. The other party doesn't have to have the same kind of handheld, or even a handheld at all (all that is necessary is a Google Calendar). You can also

hide or anonymize some events, e.g. a doctor's appointments with patients
view other people's handheld or Google calendars on your handheld, and show or hide them at will
import other Google Calendars, such as Holidays or the schedule of your favorite sports team.
import events for your city, e.g. music concerts in your city, and show or hide them at will

Setup was very simple took me about 10 mins if that and all is syncing great!

I hope that others will find this info usefull. I have been looking for a long time for a simple soultion to this problem and I think I have finally found it.

Enjoy.

PS they support 87XX, 8100, 7130 I have no idea about 72xx.

PSS they also have the following apps incase your interested.

CalendarVoice for BlackBerry
Read out your appointments for the week through your speakerphone, using your bluetooth headset as a control. You can still make or receive phone calls.

CameraRemote for BlackBerry Pearl
Use your existing BlueTooth headset as a control for your BlackBerry Pearl's camera.

**cp6169**

Thats great news, thanks.

redjim · redjim Stack level 1 Jan 2007/8 posts Trust Level:

Have you used it?? How is it working for you?
~via BB (wap.pinstack.com)~

braz · braz Stack level 2 Apr 2006/75 posts Trust Level:

~via BB (wap.pinstack.com)~redjim I have been using the trial for the last week and so far I'm impressed and can't find anything bad to say about it.

phalpernnh · phalpernnh Stack level 1 Feb 2007/4 posts Trust Level:

I tried CalendarShare and decided to buy it. Credit-card payment is processed by Handango. You receive an activation key that you must enter into the setting screen.

I think CalendarShare works quite well, but it does have limitations. For example, it only synchronizes future events, not past events. You tell it how often to synchronize (default every 6 hours) and far into the future you want to synchronize (default 7 days). There have been reports of problems when trying to synchronize too far into the future, but I don't know how long "too far into the future" is. I set my BB to synchronize 90-days into the future on my primary calendar and the US Holidays calendar. I had no problems except that it took a few minutes to do the sync. I think I'll edge it up 30-days at a time until it either breaks or takes too long to sync. I'm hoping it can go a whole year into the future.

CalendarShare allows you to import multiple GCal calendars (e.g. your spouse's calendar, your boss's calendar, and several public calendars) but it merges the imported items into your single BB calendar application. Although each GCal entry is prefixed with the name of the calendar from which it was imported, CalendarShare does not allow you to selectively choose which calendars you want to view. It really would be better if someone created an application to allow multiple calendars on the BB, with the kind of selective view that you find on the Google Calendar web view. CalendarShare annotates each calendar entry with a little data that it uses to avoid duplicate items etc. One interesting consequence of the way that it works is that if your BlackBerry is synchronized with Outlook via BES, then your GCal items will appear in Outlook and Vice-versa. Your BB becomes the conduit for synchronizing Outlook and GCal! For some people, this may be a good thing, for others, a nuisance. Again, support for multiple calendars would be nice.

You can also read another post by me on a related thread here: 2763-sync_blackberry_w_google_calendar_gcalsync-2.html#post228189

saraiya · **Google Calendar maintenance on 2/26/2007**

Hi,

This email from Google may be of interest to Google Calendar users.

We wanted to inform you that we are planning to conduct routine maintenance to Google Calendar between 8AM and 9PM on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 . During this time, this service may be unavailable to some of your users. Please inform your users about this planned maintenance appropriately. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we work to improve Google Calendar.

Nope, we don't have a clue as to what this is about.

saraiya · 12:33 PM

Hello,

We just released version 7.0 of the software for the BlackBerry. As before, upgrades for existing customers are free. Note that this will install a module called CalendarShareApp (not CalendarShare) on your BlackBerry. You will have to delete CalendarShare to run CalendarShareApp. It will preserve your software license key, but you may have to reenter some information.

To download and try, type the following into your BlackBerry browser (substituting symbols for words in the obvious way):

http colon slash slash www dot saraiya dot com slash CalendarShareBlackBerry slash otaApp.pl

The help file is at

http colon slash slash www dot saraiya dot com slash CalendarShareBlackBerry slash helpv7.html

Here are the relevant changes from the help file:

The major change in version 7 is the role of autosync.

* Autosync is now the only way to sync.
* Autosync runs completely in the background. You'll never see it.
* However, you can force a sync within 1 minute by going into Settings and choosing the Save menu item (even if you didn't change anything).
* Remember to turn Sync On in Settings, otherwise it won't sync at all.
* Rebooting your phone is no problem. Autosync will resume if you turned Sync On in Settings, or if you later turn Sync On in Settings.

queritor · queritor Stack level 1 May 2007/5 posts Trust Level:

Does this work with Google Apps, or only the free gmail accounts?

Right now I'm doing three way syncing using iCal with webdav to Exchange/BES to get it on my Blackberry, and then Spanning Sync to get iCal on my Google Apps calendar.

This solution seems a lot simpler and will eliminate Spanning Sync and the inherent delays in my current setup.

saraiya · saraiya Stack level 2 Dec 2006/94 posts Trust Level:

Quote:

Originally Posted by queritor

Does this work with Google Apps, or only the free gmail accounts?

Right now I'm doing three way syncing using iCal with webdav to Exchange/BES to get it on my Blackberry, and then Spanning Sync to get iCal on my Google Apps calendar.

This solution seems a lot simpler and will eliminate Spanning Sync and the inherent delays in my current setup.

In our testing, it worked fine on our hosted account. If it does not work for you, please email support at saraiya dot com

queritor · queritor Stack level 1 May 2007/5 posts Trust Level:

For the record, I went ahead and purchased CalendarShare and it's working perfectly with my premier Google Apps account.

Now I just need something that will sync my Apple address book with my Exchange private contacts without having to open Entourage.

saraiya · saraiya Stack level 2 Dec 2006/94 posts Trust Level:

If all you want to do is access your Google Calendar from your cell phone over the Web without transferring the data to your cell phone calendar, then you might want to try the solution that Google has just announced.

saraiya · saraiya Stack level 2 Dec 2006/94 posts Trust Level:

That url is

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/...e-devices.html

DesertBlade · DesertBlade Stack level 3 Apr 2007/121 posts Trust Level:

Will it work with a the primary email on a hosted domain?

saraiya · saraiya Stack level 2 Dec 2006/94 posts Trust Level:

Quote:

Originally Posted by DesertBlade

Will it work with a the primary email on a hosted domain?

Are you talking about our product or Google's recent solution?

sadelb · sadelb Stack level 1 May 2007/3 posts Trust Level:

what is the difference between your product and googles recent solution? Is it that googles you have to log on and yours does it automatically do blackberries calendar?