There is the handy Google calendar sync download that will do a 1 or 2-way calendar sync, but it doesn’t handle syncing contacts. I thought Google or Microsoft would address this limitation, but I’ve found that WebGear has stepped in to offer the free GO Contact Sync that does the job very nicely with many options from which to choose.
This open source program is hosted at Sourceforge, a reliable source for innovative and free software. GO Contact Sync supports categories, so if you have set up groups of categories, it will find and keep them categorized. If you use contact photos, it will sync those too. However, if you have different photos for the same contact, it will not do a sync.
The best thing are the number of sync options available.
Sync options from the website…
- Merge Prompt: This will ask you which contact to overwrite if both have been updated.
- Merge Outlook Wins: If both contacts have been updated, the Google contact will be overwritten.
- Merge Google Wins: If both contacts have been updated, the Outlook contact will be overwritten.
- Outlook To Google Only: Only updates Google contacts based on Outlook contacts.
- Google To Outlook Only: Only updates Outlook contacts based on Google contacts.
Once the program is installed, you’ll have an icon in the system tray. Here you can click to sync your contacts on the fly. However, you can choose during the setup process how often to sync, or to sync upon startup.
I just found this program and haven’t decided if I’ll use it yet since I have different sets of contacts in my Outlook and Google contacts and I’m not sure if I want to merge them or not. The program is in beta, so they do say to use at your own risk! It’s always good to do a backup before trying something new.