And now for something completely different

I, like many people, have an iPhone and use MS Outlook for emails, calendar and contacts in the office. Both are wonderful pieces of technology, but without an Exchange Server they do not like to talk to each other. I wanted to post here on how I finally made the iPhone and Outlook play nice together.

Goal: Real time 2-way sync of email, contacts and calendars between iPhone and Outlook. (for free)

Prerequisites:

IMAP email account

Google Account (Gmail and Calendar)

Nueva Sync account

Soocial.com Account

Step 1: The cloud

Register a Gmail and Google Calendar account if you don’t already have one. Gmail is going to act as the middle man between the iPhone and Outlook, it also provides a great webmail service if you are away from your phone or office.

Push Calendar from Outlook to Gmail

                Download and install the Google Calendar Sync app
 

Push contacts from outlook to Soocial.com
Add a connection for Outlook to your Soocial.com account. Install the outlook add-on and sync contacts to Soocial. Add a second connection for Gmail to your Soocial account; Soocial will now 2-way sync contacts from Outlook to Gmail.

            

Gmail Account setup

                If you go into the "Accounts and Import" settings in Gmail you can add your IMAP email to Gmail. Google will log into your email account and periodically pull any new emails into your Gmail account.

You should now have all of your Outlook data synced to your Google Account. Now that we are talking to the cloud we need to pull it down to the iPhone.

Step 2: The iPhone
Email: I connect to my email directly through the IMAP server, I don’t bother going through Gmail for this, I find going through Gmail adds a 20 minute lag, and sending and receiving directly through the IMAP server works best.

 A copy is still stored in Gmail in case you need it.

Log into your Nueva Sync account and add a connection to your Gmail account. Choose to Sync calendar and contacts, but not email (see above).

Nueva Sync will now pull contact and calendar info from Gmail to its free hosted exchange server. On your iPhone go to settings, and create a new Mail, Contacts and Calendar Account. Choose Exchange from the presets.

 Enter your NuevaSync account information.

Once everything is set up correctly anything you add to Outlook is replicated to Gmail, synced wirelessly to your iPhone and vice versa. I find the contacts and calendar sync is almost instant, I can add a contact to my phone and within 30 seconds it shows up in Outlook. Having everything replicated to Gmail is another nice feature, I have been at a clients house with no laptop and a dead cell phone battery, and was still able to pull quotes I had emailed myself just by logging into my Gmail account from their home computer.

It is unfortunate that to do what should be such a simple task takes no less than 5 different pieces of software. Google has recently added a new Apps Sync tool which accomplishes everything above, but it is not free.