I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier. It’s not new and it took one, or two, extra steps and everything worked.
First of all I use GroupWise 7 and my GW syncs up to my 2-year-old HP iPAQ. Since I own an iPAQ I have always downloaded my GW calendar to it and vice versa. The main point of me having a pocketPC was for the
calendering system and the rest are just bonuses.
Fast forward… my iPAQ still works great but like many of you who loves technology it’s time for an upgrade. A smartphone is what I have in mind. Doing this I have high hopes (my husband wishes this more than I do) that I will be answering my cell phone calls more frequently. I have my iPAQ with me all the time but my phone is a different story. I’d either loose it, it’d be out of batteries or it would in my car while I’m somewhere in the house or some other location away from my phone.
Which phone? Wow, so many options!!!! I haven’t made up my mind yet. BUT, since I can now access my GW calendar via gCal there is a chance that I can get the iPhone. We’ll see… I still want to look at a few other functionalities.
Anyhow, this seems like a really selfish research but it’s not. I know there are a lot of people here on campus who would love to know how to get all their calendar in one spot in their portable devices and also access everything via gCal (you can probably use this round about way with other online calendar). So here are the steps:
- Use Outlook instead of GroupWise on your Windows machine <– I think this is the key. I have Outlook 2007 installed but the previous version worked just fine. When you set Outlook up, you want to make sure that you select/point your Outlook to your GroupWise settings. To set up Outlook, I did the following (there are probably other ways but this worked for me after crashing my computer many time before I got to this point, I just stick to these steps):
- Go to your Control Panel and open up Mail
- Click Show Profiles and Add a new one
- Give it a Profile Name and click OK
- Highlight that new profile and go to the Properties
- Under Email tab (if Novell GW is not currently showing), click New and then select Other and highlight Novell GroupWise
- Go Next and that should complete the steps
- Under the Data Files tab click Add and you can select Office Outlook Personal Folder File and click OK
- It’ll ask where you want to save this file (I like to save it in my D drive with the rest of my files) and click OK when you’re done
- Click on the Address Books tab and select the address book you’d like to use, I use the GW Address Book and click Next
- Close everything until you get to the main Mail pop-up window (where you created your profile)
- On the bottom of that page, click on Always use this profile
- In the drop-down select the new profile you just created
- Click Apply and then OK
- Open Outlook and voila… your GroupWise everything will be in Outlook
From here you can sync up GW to your mobile computing device OR go a few more steps…
- Go to Google Calendar and on the top right (next to your email address) is the word Sync
- You’re all grown adults and should be able to follow the simple directions provided on that page
- I used the Outlook and the Mozilla Sunbird syncing option (I don’t have Mac OS X v10.5+ so the iCal is a no go for me)
That’s it!!
I could have also not done the Sunbird syncing and just go with the IMAP but for the sake of this research I went all the way. I did notice that the gCal-Sunbird sync is very quick. The gCal-Outlook not so. The initial syncing went by fast but the once after were snail pace-ish. I’m not sure if this is my system or this technology in general. Just FYI, my Windows machine lacks juice. It is a Pentium 4, 3.4GHz with 2Gigs of RAM. It sounded so great a few years ago but now… wow, slower than I want it to be! I’ll let it go for today. I have other things I need to do. If I find out other issues, I’ll update this post.
Enjoy!
Posted: January 6th, 2009 under Tips/Tricks.
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