Calendar, Contacts and Mail form a key part of your personal infrastructure. Google Apps provides the simplest implementation of this and they recently announced that they have enabled full push support – meaning that any changes you make anywhere are reflected everywhere else in realtime.

What does this mean? If you make a calendar entry on your phone it gets updated on your laptop calendar instantly. If you edit a friend’s mobile phone number using the webmail interface while you are looking at that same entry on your phone’s address book, it will change right in front of you.

Realtime means there are on longer any versioning issues. It means multiple people can work together on the same thing at the same time. It means there is no more double-handling of information trying to shuffle it between devices. All of this is a very good thing!

Another great feature is meeting requests. If you have worked in a large corporate environment you will know how useful this is through Exchange server – and now any business or individual can use Google Apps to access those same benefits for free. As long as your friends use the same system you can easily invite them to events and stay on the same page if you ever need to change the date or venue.

How did I set up Google Sync on Webmail?

1. All of the web interfaces update themselves automatically, so there is no need to install anything.

How did I set up Google Sync on my Macbook Pro?

1. Go to preferences and click ‘add an account’.
2. Select Gmail, type in your email address and password and you’re done!

How did I set up Google Sync on my iPhone?

1. I’m assuming that you have set up your Google Apps instance on your domain (I use rosshill.com.au).
2. Before we get started, make sure you back up all of your mobile phone contacts and calendar entries – save them somewhere safe on your computer.
3. Next import all of your contacts to Google Contacts and Google Calendar.
4. Follow the Google Sync instructions for your iPhone.
5. On your iPhone enable sync for Mail, Contacts and Calendar. Note: during this process you want to erase the existing Contacts and Calendar entries that are on your phone, because as soon as the information syncs for the first time you only want the cloud data on your phone and not two copies of everything!

Sure, some people will take issue with the increased power usage that push systems require, but as long as you plug in the charger each night it really isn’t a problem. Having this infrastructure in place is amazingly useful and once you turn it on you never want to go back.

Bring on the cloudification!

By Ross Hill - September 24th, 2009 at 7:17pm with 628 views - google