Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Synchronizing Outlook contacts with Google account: Go Contacts Sync is the solution

Master data

After migrating my semi-public contact list (an address book with official company contact details, already available on the Net) to Google Contacts, for ease of access on my mobile, now I had to tackle the thorny issue of synching some of such lists with Outlook, which I still use, mostly for privacy's sake.

After trial and error, I settled on this GNU product:  Go Contacts Sync Mod, a fork of the previous equally useful Go Contacts Sync daemon.

Go and try it. If you like it, there is the donate page... Feed the hungry programmer! ;)

Here is a more extensive review.


Tips

  • Before you sync anything, create a backup of your data, both in Outlook and in Google
  • Apart from a lump complete backup of your PST Outlook file, create folder with a copy of your contacts that you want to sync.
  • Test syncing on an empty Google account

Alternatively, you may use Microsoft Contacts, aka Hotmail, to synchronize the semipublic part of your contact list. Here's the MS article with the procedure.