Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

For those of you struggling with syncing your iPhone Cal, Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar, I've got a solution for you. I call it the "Hard Way" since there's probably a more elegant and less kludgy way to accomplish this. But I haven't found one that I've been satisfied with.

I'll dispense with any more rhetoric and get on with it. Here's a diagram to follow along with.

1. Download and install Google Calendar Sync for Outlook. This is a little program that runs on your local machine. It pushes and pulls calendar data between your computer and Google Calendar. The flaw here, of course, is that it's only effective when your computer is running and connected to the web. But if that's not a big issue for you, keep going. 
2. Backup your iPhone.
3. No, really. Go backup your iPhone, cowboy. You stand to obliterate your contacts and old calendar data, as you will see in the next step.
4. Go to Google Mobile Sync for iPhone. You already backed up your iPhone, so go to Step 2 "Set Up your iPhone." There you will configure it to push and pull data from Google. When you're almost complete it will ask you to confirm that you're ok with the possibility of blowing away your data. It will ask you twice. You backed up, right? If so, take a deep breath and proceed.
   
5. Wait a few minutes for everything to get synced up. If you hosed your old data, I take no responsibility for that. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier?