google apps sync for microsoft outlook mac

Google Apps Sync For Microsoft Outlook How To Set Up
Google Apps Sync For Microsoft Outlook Update All Contacts

In a nutshell, Google, Microsoft and Apple denied responsibility for any problems using Outlook 2011 with Google.

However, this benefit can come with an unexpected price tag in the form of complex problems.

Heres the warning tale of one companys experience using Outlook 2011 with Google Apps.

For those who would rather use a familiar email program instead, there are a number of options; Outlook, Apple Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird (Mozilla is shifting gears away from Thunderbird development, but this client will still continue to work indefinitely).

In fact, any IMAP or POP mail program will work with Google for email, but Outlook for Windows has the best advantage thanks to a program called Google Apps Sync which can handle synchronization of email, calendar, contacts and notes.

Google Apps Sync For Microsoft Outlook How To Set Up

Here is a good article with instructions on how to set up these programs if youd like to pursue this direction.

In some cases non-supported applications will still work fine if you have know-how and luck; in other cases some very unique problems can develop.

One of my users, Jill, has the sole Mac in the organization (as well as an iPhone and iPad).

Since she was familiar with Outlook 2011 - which had connected beautifully to a local Exchange server - we opted to see what was involved with allowing her to use Outlook 2011 to connect to Google Apps.

She could also use the Apple Mail client, but preferred Outlook 2011.

Google Apps Sync For Microsoft Outlook Update All Contacts

Note that the Mac Address Book is sort of the highway for contact transmission; it was decided that Jill should update all contacts in Outlook 2011 so they could then be copied to the Mac Address Book, Google, and her iPhoneiPad.

Jills emails and calendar items were present and available in Outlook 2011 and iCal, respectively.

Maybe the Mac Address Book kept copying those entries to Outlook 2011 or it was sending them up to Google.

Most likely, something was sending the bad contacts in BOTH directions, in an exponential algorithm akin to 2x2x2x2x2x2.

This had to be rerun several times, but eventually the 100K contacts were reduced to the original 5000 or so.

I then located the corrupt contacts and removed those, along with a few others that looked questionable.

I shut off Sync Services in Outlook 2011, which was synchronizing contacts with the Mac Address Book, then unlinked the Google account in the Mac Address Book.

It was tough work deleting the duplicates from both programs; there is an option to do so in the Mac Address Book but it was glacially slow and seemed to keep freezing without results (probably due to the sheer number of entries involved).

Eventually after consulting some Apple forums I wound up deleting the Mac Address Book database file and recreating it.

There is a product called Scrubly which claims to be able to remove duplicate contacts in Outlook 2011 but we opted not to pursue it for what we hoped would be a one-shot fix.

I restarted contact synchronization between Google and the Mac Address Book.

I restarted Sync Services to get the Mac Address Book contacts into Outlook 2011, and this seemed to work.

If the duplicates returned, wed know this was the source of the issue.

Google Apps Sync For Microsoft Outlook Mac