Sync contacts (phone/outlook/gmail)

[Vancer]

This has been an ongoing problem and I'm sorry to say that I haven't found a really good solution Google put out the calendar sync which works flawlessly but not a "contact sync" yet, even though everybody has been screaming for it. My guess is that with all the .icf stuff these days it is pretty easy to make one calendar (outlook, google, etc..) sync with another. Contacts, on the other hand, are a very different issue. If you look at all the various fields in an outlook contact compared to the fields in a google contact you will see that the google contact is very primitive compared to the outlook contact. My guess is that this is the reason google hasn't put out a "contact sync" like the calendar sync. Imagine all the problems they would have to account for in various fields and naming issues of said fields. GRRR!

I ended up backing up my outlook.pst, syncing my contacts from outlook to my phone, then syncing them with google to get them all online. After that (huge pain in the ass), I went in and cleaned up all my contacts on google, deleted all my contacts in outlook (still retaining the outlook.pst just in case), exported them so that I could then import them back into outlook. Now all my contacts (at that time) in my phone, google, and outlook matched. Anytime I add a contact on my phone it of course updates google and then from time to time (or each time I add a contact to my phone) I have to export from google again and re-import into outlook to keep them all up to date and matched. It sucks but is the only way I know to get them all cleaned up and "somewhat" matched.

I also tried GoContact Sync w/o much luck

If anybody finds a seemless solutions PLEASE POST!

[OMJ]

Originally Posted by chardog

I think this is a general problem for android users. I payed 20 bux for gsyncit. After the initial setup, the sync is easy to do, and done over the cloud, so it's pretty convenient.

There are closer tools to activesync, but I cant recall right now.

I just tried gSyncit, it works pretty good. My google & outlook contact list were very similar, but not identical. So I backed up both & ran gSyncit, now they are identical.....thx for the suggestion.

[JimSmith94]

I had a lot of trouble with HTC Sync with Outlook and my Evo. Then someone mentioned that Microsoft's ScanPST utility had helped them: How to find and run the Inbox Repair tool in Outlook. It took several runs, but my PST file errors were finally fixed, and HTC Sync worked much better.

I still have a relatively small problem where some of my most used contacts get switched to first name, last name in Outlook. Other than that, it's been pretty solid.

A more major problem for me is Google's inability to handle variations in recurring calendar events. As this Google forum thread shows, it was first reported in March, 2009 and still hasn't been fixed: Issue 2229 - android - Calendar: Deleting one instance of a recurring event (excluding), results in duplication of it. - Project Hosting on Google Code