Category Archives: Outlook Sync

Google Sync with Outlook

Posted on by Wayland Bruns
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Let’s face it. The PC is still faster than the Web!  Entering quick info on the PC, will be faster than loading a Web App like Google Calendar every time.clg sync-3I took a phone call today. I need to find a bit of info, and call the customer back tomorrow. So I set a quick reminder on my Calendar for 10am tomorrow to call. How do I get that to my phone?

My phone is my essential reminder tool. I absolutely depend on the alarms there to remind me what to do throughout my day. The phone automatically synchronizes to Google. So it works fine if I made the appointment in Google.

But I didn’t make the appointment in Google. To do that means launching my browser, log into Google, search for Calendar, decide which calendar, and then adding an entry. I don’t have time for that.

The best way to go from Outlook to Google is CompanionLink for Google. It’s easy to set up, and completely automatic. I don’t even press a sync button. Just make the change in outlook, and it is automatically sent to Google. With CompanionLink, you don’t even need to open Google. When I make an appointment on the phone, it moves back to Outlook automatically.

CompanionLink for Google is $49.95. Use the affinity code “BLOG” to get $10 off. You can download it right now and run a two-week trial. The trial has 100% of the features.

Google Sync (the native sync to Android and iPhone) is great for Contacts and Calendar. If you also use Tasks, Category Colors, or Notes, then we recommend using a dedicated App on our phone called DejaOffice. Click on that link for more information.

How to synchronize Outlook Category Colors through Google Sync for your Android and iPhone

Posted on by Wayland Bruns
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  1. Download CompanionLink for Google
  2. Set it to sync from Outlook
  3. Set it to sync your Google Contacts and Calendar
  4. On Android and iPhone set Google Sync.

I love category colors.  As a business person; green appointments mean money, red are urgent, yellow are cautious.  I use purples and blues for personal and recreational stuff.  When I glance at my day, or my week, it’s the colors that I see, not the text.

We were “in the room” when Google created Google Calendar.   That is; we were one of the companies chosen to see the “secret beta” back in 2006.  This was months before the Calendar was available to the public. It was a lot of fun to go to Google’s campus and to get the secret information.  What was not fun at all was understanding the level of inexperience Google had with PC office calendars.

In 2006, PC Outlook had been out for nine years, Microsoft Schedule Plus for about nine years before that. Polaris Packrat was in full swing back in 1986, and in 1984 I remember Commence had a great Calendar for Windows.  One would have thought that Google would take advantage of all these past Calendar products, and base their new offering on them.

Nope!  Google is a linux shop! Linux people always seem to want to create everything from scratch. So Google Calendar emerged with its own new way of handling recurring events, folders, and categories. It had few of the capabilities that PC calendars of that era offered.  It was a huge up for them to climb to add revision after revision for things that everyone could already do 20 years before on PCs.

One of those things is Category Colors.  Outlook ties colors to different categories.  So my business appointments are one color, and personal appointments are a different color.  Google first tied colors to different calendars, and then added a secondary color attribute.

CompanionLink for Google handles category colors well.  If you need your Outlook colors on your Samsung Galaxy Phone, or your iPhone 7, then a great way to move them is with CompanionLink for Google.

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While Outlook associates colors with a Category, in Google it simply shows with a color “dot” on our main Google Calendar.

If you want to see colors on your Android phone, or your iPhone, use the Google App on the phone.  This will Google Sync from your Google Calendar, and it will include the colors.

CompanionLink for Google is $49.95 and available for download now.  You can get set up in about 15 minutes.  Thanks for reading!

Wayland Bruns, CTO
CompanionLink Software, Inc.

 

Secure Contact Sync without Google or Exchange

Posted on by Wayland Bruns
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This week brought us news of a clever phishing scheme using Google Docs. People received a realistic email from a trusted business associate. The email contained a link to a Google Doc. Opening the document required you go through Google OAuth and entering your Email and Password.

Fortunately, Google OAuth is secure, so the password was not stolen. Unfortunately, the phisher obtained a token that allowed them to access your gmail account, allowing them to send an email to all of your professional contacts.

Frustrated with Google

This attack underscores a weak point in data security. When your email and contact information is stored on a public cloud server, the server becomes a target for obtaining your valuable information.  Instead of targeting the billions of computers that are used to store business information locally, phishers target the “big three” who collect the data in complex systems that allow others access to it.

Notwithstanding the phishing attack, Google, Microsoft and Apple reserve the right to farm your data and re-sell it. Google will scan your data and target advertising to you. If you send an email about an Acapulco vacation, you will soon find your browsing full of offers for cheap resorts. Microsoft and Apple are more circumspect about their data scanning. But they still store and mine the data, and work to derive profit from it.

CompanionLink provides a secure alternative to storing your company’s data on a highly public server. If you use our USB, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth Sync, your data is not stored at all. We offer a secure cloud service called DejaCloud. This service is significantly different from Exchange, iCloud and Google Sync. With DejaCloud, we do not derive income from mining and selling the data. Our source of income is product sales and subscription service, and that’s all. We are not a public company and do not have to split our loyalty between our customers and our shareholders.

I remember years ago how proud I was as my customer list grew from 500 contacts, to 600, and then over one thousand. At that time I was using Goldmine, and we sold Add-On products for Act! and Goldmine. Today we have 1.8 million entries in our various databases, and I’m still proud that this list has never been hacked, and will never be stored in a public database.

How to Sync Outlook Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes with iPhone 6s

Posted on by Wayland Bruns
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There seems no end to sync solutions for iPhone.  The problem is; they all devolve into Apple-like simplicity.

Face it.  We use Outlook because it is fast, effective, and the whole world supports it.  It is forced on us by our business, it runs our mail, it runs our appointments, and the less time we can spend there, the more we can do our jobs.

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With iPhone, the best known solutions are feeble, at best.  With Apple iCloud, you need to create a different Outlook folder and move your data to it.  You need to put up with problems with it, with mail and other things.  And then, when it gets to iPhone, you have no Tasks any more just reminders.

With Office 365 and the Outlook App you have a different set of problems.  It all gets to the phone ok (except for tasks again) but the only thing that is marginally good with the Outlook App from Microsoft is the email.  Hello Microsoft:  Email is NOT a problem on the iPhone.

So that’s what CompanionLink and DejaOffice are here to do. Synchronize Outlook Contacts, and Outlook Calendar, and Outlook Tasks to the iPhone.  Not only to move them, safely and securely, but DejaOffice provides an Outlook-like ecosystem on the iPhone and Android so that you can continue to do Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes just like your PC.  So if you want to schedule an appointment, or make a task for a contact, you can do that in one App on your phone.  If you have Recurring Tasks, CompanionLink and DejaOffice is the only solution available that supports them on all platforms.

CompanionLink also works for Outlook for Mac 2011 and Outlook for Mac 2015.

Here’s how to sync Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Memos:

  1. On your PC or Mac; Download the CompanionLink for Outlook 14-day trial
  2. On your iPhone or Android phone, download DejaOffice for Outlook
  3. Set up USB, Wi-Fi or DejaCloud sync

That’s it!  You’ll have your data on your phone.  For more information here’s our info page for CompanionLink for Outlook.