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I’m pretty spoiled by Exchange and Outlook at work.  Regardless of all the Microsoft hate out there, Exchange/Outlook is great for email, calendars, contacts and tasks in an enterprise environment.  For a while now I have been wanting to set up something similar at home.  Recently I started using Google’s various services (GMail, Calendar and Contacts) along side my primary emails at pobox.com and it has worked out well.

I use Thunderbird as my main email client (on both Mac and Windows) and started looking for ways to sync it up with Google.  For calendars there is the Lightning extension, which can sync with Google Calendar using the Provider for Google Calendar extension.  (Update: Google Calendar now supports CalDav which means you can edit calendars directly from Sunbird/Lightning.) There’s also the Google Contacts extension which syncs Thunderbird’s address book to Google.  Finally, Thunderbird can, of course, access GMail and pobox.com using IMAP.

Once I got my workstation and laptop syncing to Google I moved on to my iPhone.  The iPhone itself can only access GMail via IMAP.  The phone can sync contacts and calendars with MobileMe, a pretty clear competitor to Google’s offerings, as well as Exchange servers using ActiveSync.   MobileMe is not free however so I started looking at other solutions.  At first I had to rely on Google’s iPhone enabled webpages for Calendar and iTunes’ ability to sync to Google Contacts.  I was also using Google Calendar Sync to sync between Outlook and Google, and then using iTunes on Windows to sync between Outlook and the iPhone, but this was kind of clunky.  However, yesterday Google trumped Apple by enabling Contacts and Calendar to use the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to sync with the iPhone directly.  With this I now have a direct link between the iPhone and Google Contacts and Calendar, and can avoid the whole iTunes intermediary thing or using the Google mobile webpages.  Another good part is that the iPhone’s Exchange support utilizes push, so updates made on one computer are instantly reflected on the phone.

Finally, I discovered calaboration which allows iCal 3.x to sync directly with Google Calendar.

With all these pieces together, I have a fairly complete mail/contacts/calendar solution that works across multiple computers and my iPhone.  The only glaring hole is task management, which can be handled in part on the iPhone with Things, but not across platforms.  There is hope on the horizon with GMail Tasks, but that just came out and there isn’t any sync support for it yet.  Otherwise, the Google-Thunderbird-Lightning-iCal-iPhone sync system seems to be working pretty well so far.

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