Pushing Contacts and Calendars with Google Apps

Here we go Google Sync! Time to see how close we can get to killing off MobileMe!

Looks great right? One warn­ing caught my eye:

Google Apps user? This ser­vice needs to be enabled for your domain before you can use it. Please con­tact your domain administrator.

K, so I am said Admin­is­tra­tor. What do I need to do here? Please don’t tell me I need to upgrade to a Pre­mium Account, not after all this work Google. Don’t do it to me. Don’t!

Whew!

From: Google Sync via ActiveSync — Google Apps Help

If you’d like to enable Google Sync for your domain, fol­low these steps:

1. In the Ser­vice set­tings sec­tion of your Dash­board, click the Mobile link.
2. Select the check­box next to Enable Google Sync.
3. Click Save changes.

This fea­ture is cur­rently avail­able only in the Next Gen­er­a­tion ver­sion of the con­trol panel.

Did it, done. Whew!

Migrat­ing my MobileMe and Local Cal­en­dars to my Domain-Controlled Google Apps Google Calendar

So let’s start with get­ting my calendar.forsbergville.com Google Cal­en­dar set-up. I log-in and it con­firms the time zone, etc. and bam! Up.

Next I down­loaded a neat tool that basi­cally adds Google Cal­en­dars to your Apple iCal (10.5 and up only) pro­gram. Note that in 10.5 and up iCal, you can also do this man­u­ally as the new iCal sup­ports ical: sub­scrip­tions (love you Apple — had the Kool Aid made into con­ve­nient pop­si­cles and poured into baby bot­tles just so I can be near it more — you rock). The tool was called Cal­ab­o­ra­tion. Any­way, that got each newly cre­ated Google Cal­en­dar into iCal all talk­ing back and forth. Sweet. Next, I exported the cor­re­spond­ing cal­en­dars I already had either on MobileMe or locally into sep­a­rate .ics files vis iCal’s great Export… fea­ture. Once done, I used the Google Cal­en­dar Import… fea­ture and imported to each Google Cal­en­dar cal­en­dar. Again — whew! K, done.

After ver­i­fy­ing that each one looked good in iCal (I should and did have dupli­cates of every item as I should not see the orig­i­nal in iCal as well as the newly sub­scribed to items. I did. Sweet. I delete the local/Mobile me cal­en­dars com­pletely, quit iCal, start it again just to be sure, and walla. Cake.

Migrat­ing my MobileMe and Local Address Book Data to my Domain-Controlled Google Address Book

Will go here — need a break at the moment but will edit this post soon to round it off.