Help automatically syncing contacts between outlook and gmail

[boatman]

I have come to the droid from treo/winmo/bb. On each of those platforms, they had a program that would sync contacts, calendar, todo, and memo from outlook. You plugged your phone in via usb, it would be detected, and voila, you would sync.

I knew when I purchased the droid this couldn't be done natively. I have been able to get my calendar to sync with the google calendar sync app that so far runs fairly well. It syncs my outlook calendar to my gmail calendar.

However, I want to sync my outlook contacts. Note, I did not say I want to IMPORT/EXPORT. I do know how to do that, and that is not syncing.

I want changes I make on my contacts on my phone to show up in outlook and viceversa. BTW, I am running pop, not exchange.

It doesn't have to be direct connect, it can be through the cloud.

The only thing I have found so far is soocial.com . I don't know how this works, and I am looking to see if anyone has found an acceptable solution to this issue so far. 'The missing sync' is supposed to release something at the end of the month to address this, but their solution is $40 and I don't know how well it will work as a 1st release. Thanks.

 

[Redflea]

SyncMyCal will sync contacts from Outlook to Google for you. I use it to do that. Costs about $15 IRRC. Does both calendar and contacts sync. Seems to work pretty well.

So will another program...rats, can't remember the name of the program right now, but there is another one that will do that as well.

 

[ddarvish]

i use soocal and if you can deal with 30 mintue delays in the syncs then it is awesome especially for the price (free)

 

[boatman]

can you tell me if soocial gives you options on the sync. For instance, if I want to only have my contacts in outlook go to gmail, can I specify this? I can't ever have my outlook address book get overwritten, corrupted, etc.

Also, if I have already exported my outlook to gmail, how does it handle this? Should I get rid of my address book in gmail, and let this transfer them? Thanks.

 

[ddarvish]

i cant remember if there is a way to sync only 1 direction such that it never touches your outlook addressbook but i remember there are ways to have it backup your address book every so often so that should anything become corrupt it will fix it. I would back up both my gmail contacts and outlook and then have it sync up the first time. it did an excellent job of not duplicating anything or causing problems though if you prefer you can remove all ur gmail contacts and have the sync go from outlook to soocial then from soocial to gmail. i have had no issues with it so far other than it is not compatible with office 2010 beta yet (though it doesnt sound ur running that)

 

[Redflea]

I have to add that I've discovered a problem w/my events on the Droid that I think may be from w/SyncMyCal - events get from Outlook to Google Calendar fine, but then sync down to the Droid w/out reminders. If I enter an event on Google Calendar it syncs w/reminders just fine, so I'm thinking there is something different about how SyncMyCal puts events into Google...things used to sync w/reminders just fine, so it may be that there was an update to SyncMyCal that broke things...