…Big Mess.

So yesterday I thought I’d give Google a try and move my calendar and contacts over the the cloud. I didn’t realize it’d turn into such a nightmare - my assumption was that Google’s online tools such as Gmail and Calendar are well tested, since they have been out there for a while, and that they are well-suited to handle personal information management. What a big surprise.

First of all, I was never enthusiastic about keeping these things online due to security and privacy concerns. BUT, there are practical advantages, too. The most important one is having the same information on a few different devices. (Provided that you use more than 2 terminals - cause if you only use 1 PC and 1 cellphone, then it’s easy to keep them both in sync.) The other advantage is that when you get robbed or when your house burns down, you can still access your data Finally, the one reason that made me pull the trigger is that I just decided to buy an Android-based phone, which in theory should work perfectly with Google services. (It doesn’t, I’ll write about it in a different post soon.)

I started with the calendar. It was quite easy to get the data out there. I used popular software from CompanionLink to transfer my Palm-based calendar over to the Google cloud. Problems started when Google added 7 hours to all of my events (timezone difference between Europe and U.S. - I frequently travel between the two). And there was no way to change that. It turns out, Google doesn’t handle timezone switching well. More on this issue here. Palm has figured it out years ago, Google couldn’t… So I basically had to forget about migrating my past calendar entries and started from scratch…

Then, the next problem came up. Google boasts all over the web that Gmail and Calendar are now available offline thanks to the Google Gears. They just don’t mention one little detail - that it’s read-only access. Let me ask one question then: why would anybody want a calendar that he or she can only look at? Oh, and in the case of Gmail Contacts, they’re not available offline at all. I think this whole Gears support is one big joke…

So I thought the next step would be to install a desktop client, one that would let me manage my calendar offline and then sync with the Google service. I learned on Google help page, that it offers sync with two desktop clients on PC - MS Outlook and Mozilla Sunbird. Quoting the from the Google Calendar Help:

With CalDAV support in Google Calendar, you’ll be able to view and edit your Google Calendar events directly in other calendar applications, such as Apple iCal or Mozilla Sunbird. […] If you use other calendar applications while offline, changes you make will be saved and updated in Google Calendar when you get back online.

The problem is, as it turned out, that Sunbird doesn’t allow for offline Calendar use. You can only “subcribe to a Remote Calendar” or manually import/export calendar data. Oh, and their new, experimental, as they say, caching feature allows to cache the last-seen Google calendar data and display it while offline. So this is really no different from what Gears does… What a disappointment! (There is a workaround for that, but it’s insane - you can install a local web server on your PC that imitates Google Calendar, sync your cal with it and then when you’re online, it will sync with Google. If this a solution for business, then I’m afraid most of us will need to go back to school for more IT classes…)

So I didn’t want to use Outlook, but it seemed like I had no choice. I opened it up and used the free app provided by Google to sync my calendar data. It worked OK.

Time for contacts. Since I was forced to use Outlook, I thought to myself - let’s transfer contacts there too. Because I was getting a lot of discrepancies when exporting data from Palm Desktop to Outlook, I decided to export my data to csv first, then import to Gmail, and then sync Gmail with Outlook.

I just had to get my csv file right. There is a page in Google help that provides hints on formatting the csv file. It’s a very short explanation so I thought the system is so smart, that it’ll easily recognize column headers in different configurations, just like with the first and last name in the above article. Another surprise - I couldn’t get my basic csv file to work - I had to export sample csv data from Gmail first and then modify my data so that it was precisely in their format. One of the problems was that my addresses were in separate fields (street, city, state, zip) and even though those fields were available in the sample Google csv file, Gmail won’t read from them unless I merge the whole address together and save into another field…

After a couple modifications and a few Excel macros written to format data correctly, the import finally went OK. Well, not quite. There is one bug. It turns out, that even though the sample csv file from Google has a ‘Birthdate’ field, it doesn’t really work at all. I even tried to export a contact with a birthdate already set, then delete it online and import back on from the earlier-generated file. Still, the Birthdate field didn’t get loaded. I’ll have to load up birth dates to the calendar then… Manually…

The other thing is… during the process, I’ve come across some side issues that are worth mentioning. The first one is pretty obvious:

The second one shows 9 ghost contacts in the Gmail database after I deleted them all - they are visible in the left pane, but there is nothing in the right pane:

OK, back to the point. So the problem now was that after about a thousand records imported, the Gmail Contacts app got very slow on the newest Firefox 3.5. In fact, it was almost unusable. I had to switch to Chrome. (That helped a lot - I can now search through contacts and edit them.) I don’t know if this is Google’s strategy - to build apps that are a couple times slower on other browsers, I hope not. (Side note: Most likely those are just JavaScript technology limitations. Safari & Chrome have fastest JavaScript rendering engines, so hopefully Mozilla steps up and officially releases their new browser Minefield soon.) The other thing that’s worth noticing here, is that if you want to have your “superb” (see above), read-only access to Google Contacts/Calendar with Gears, you have to install it separately on every browser you’re using (which means multiple, offline copies of the same contacts/calendar database, I guess.)

I thought I was almost finished as now I only had to sync contacts between Gmail and Outlook - the two most popular e-mail clients these days. Since there is no official, free tool that’d do it, I chose proprietary ones that came up at the top in Google search. Those were “Go Contact Sync” and “KiGoo”. The first one was giving me errors all the time during the sync, and it sort of worked, except for the fact that the addresses wouldn’t appear in Outlook at all. (I used 2003 version, maybe that’s why.) The second one worked better, but was more invasive and didn’t offer any configuration whatsoever. The other problem with Outlook was that when there were two phone numbers of the same type (e.g. one contact had two “Mobile” phone numbers entered), then Outlook didn’t see the second one at all. Eventually, I didn’t manage to fix this issues, because my Outlook broke, and now I can’t even open it… I’m guessing it’s KiGoo’s fault, as it installed as an Outlook plugin, but I’m not sure.

So I was back in the dark. I’m not the one who gives up to easily though Only had to find an app that would let me manage my contacts & calendar while being offline. I wish I could try Apple iCal here, maybe that’d work… (It’s the third one listed by Google in addition to Outlook and Sunbird.) But since I had no better idea, I thought I’d give my good, old Palm Desktop one more try. The CompanionLink software helped again, I still had to spend some time on reformatting the csv data so that both programs would understand each other well, but at least at the end, it seems to sync fine.

This is not the end though. If it all wasn’t enough, Gmail service went down at the very end and was down for almost 1.5 hours…

All of this can only lead to one conclusion - Google is not ready to host our most important stuff online. I mean you can do it, but it will consume a lot of time, and you have to be a power user to solve all problems. Is it worth it? Probably not, especially if you take privacy concerns into consideration.