01.23
Recently I was getting ready to migrate one of my clients over to Google Apps Premier – they are a small office that uses Outlook without an Exchange server, so it seemed like a no brainer.
Unfortunately, as I soon discovered, Google Apps Premier has a pretty major Achilles’ heel – NO SUPPORT FOR TASKS!
Now, this probably doesn’t come as news to some, but I guess it is just one of those features I never noticed was missing until now. I mean, I don’t use Outlook at all, and even when I was I never used Outlook tasks, but apparently a lot of people do.
The really odd thing is that Google Calendar does have the concept of tasks, but for some reason they just don’t sync with Outlook. It is a real head-scratcher.
However, there is a silver lining (sticking with the whole cloud metaphor) – there is a product called “Companion Link for Google”, and it actually has quite a nifty workaround. It syncs Outlook Tasks and Notes with Google’s Calendar and Contacts respectively. Basically it creates a Google calendar item for each Outlook Task, and then adds the prefix “Task:” to it. Likewise it creates a Google contact item for each Outlook Note, and then adds the characters “|M|” before and after the contact name (as such they always show up at the top of your contact list). The reason this workaround is so clever – it ensures that Google Sync for Mobile (on my Blackberry for example) will catch contacts and notes as well (since they are nothing more than Calendar and Contact items to Google).
Now, creating/editing tasks and notes in Google Apps can be tricky — because you have to adhere strictly to the above syntax — and there is no way to mark a task as complete on the Google side short of deleting it. However, all and all, it is a fairly elegant solution.
Companion Link has some other benefits to, namely:
- You can specify which calendars you want to sync (and it integrates with Outlook categories), and whether or not you want to sync items marked “personal”
- Each Companion Link for Google license is only $39.99 one-time, and since you can use it with Google Apps Standard, you actually come out cheaper that way ($39.99 one-time vs $50/year, you do the math)
The biggest downside of Companion Link for Google – it doesn’t do mail. Thus, you are dependent on IMAP for getting your mail into Outlook. Don’t get me wrong, IMAP works well, but it just isn’t as transparent and clean of an implementation as Google Apps Sync for Outlook (which uses MAPI on the Outlook side).
The bottom line, if you use tasks and notes (in addition to contacts and calendar), then Companion Link for Google is really the only way to go, at least for the time being.
