Now, before you refresh the page to make sure this isn’t a mistake, I have in fact created a fourth part to my three-part series on The Search for a Free Spanning Sync. Why? Well, after my formal search was complete, I still hadn’t found a really good alternative to Spanning Sync, yet I wasn’t ready just yet to pay my $65. But recently, I noticed that Plaxo, a free service I started using last year that syncs your Address Book contacts across multiple machines, had a new 3.0 beta out. At first, this new beta simply looked like a Web 2.0 overhaul of the site, but then I noticed two very important changes — iCal and Google Calendar syncing. As you could imagine, I rushed to sync with my Google Account and download the new OS X Plaxo app. Unfortunately, things didn’t work so well for syncing my calendars, so I decided to give up. But then last week, when Plaxo 3.0 went into its public beta and people began talking about this bi-directional sync functionality, I decided to give it a shot again. So far, the results have been very good.
Before I divulge into the process of syncing Google Calendar and iCal through Plaxo, I should really explain what Plaxo is. At its heart, Plaxo is a free, online service for syncing and sharing your contacts. You can sync you contacts with a variety of desktop apps, including OS X’s Address Book, Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, and even Mozilla Thunderbird. Plus, if you have Plaxo members as contacts, their contact data automatically updates and syncs to all of your machines. But recently, Plaxo has been adding more features. One is the ability to sync Plaxo’s calendar, which I’ve never used until very recently, with your desktop apps. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities, especially since Plaxo has now begun to support syncing with web services, such as Google and Yahoo. Combined with a new iCal-supporting Plaxo OS X client, I prepared to embark on The Search for a Free Spanning Sync: Part IV.
The Plaxo set up was easy enough. I simply clicked “add sync point” at the bottom of the Plaxo home screen, clicked the OS X button, and went through the Plaxo wizard to download, install, and configure the client app. The program runs from the menubar and is configurable from System Preferences, which worked great for me. My iCal calendars and events got synced into new calendars created on Plaxo perfectly, and Plaxo even handles my subscribed iCal calendars very well. So far, so good, but I needed to see how well syncing new events worked. I added a new event to my iCal calendar, but made the mistake of closing iCal in the middle of a sync, resulting in a brief slowdown on my Mac and a very large XML file appearing in Growl. Fortunately, a re-sync without quiting iCal resulted in my event appearing in the Plaxo calendar. Now I had to sync it to Google Calendar. Plaxo didn’t seem to sync to Google right away, so I had to manually press the sync button. The event got to my Google Calendar, but I ended up having duplicate calendars. To solve this, I deleted the duplicates in Google Calendar, Plaxo, and iCal, and deleted the Google sync point. I then re-added the sync point, but this time made sure to pair up my Plaxo and Google Calendars manually. The result was perfect, three-way syncing. At long last, The Search for the Free Spanning Sync was complete.
So, after all of this time, my quest to be cheap for a free alternative to Spanning Sync has come to an end. Now don’t get me wrong, Plaxo still has some kinks that need to be worked out, but the new version is still in beta, so it has the potential to get a lot better over time. But overall, I’m very happy with my “free Spanning Sync.”
I works but unfortunately plaxo doesn't sync alarms/reminders. So I have the events but not the reminders. Shame, very nearly there!
Plaxo? Isn't that the app that spams every entry in your address book requesting some kind of confirmation?
I've had apologies from more than one person who did this.
Hi Aaron! I'm trying to sync my ical calendars with plaxo and google, but it doesn't seem to do anything! I followed all the steps you got here still nothing! Is there something i should do in ical?
I'm wary of Plaxo. Last time I tried it, it created duplicates of all my MS Outlook entries, which I had to go in and manually delete the duplicates. Notice carefully that the website says the PAID version of Plaxo avoids duplicates. The inference is that the free version creates duplicate entries. That's scandalous. I'm going to wait for lots of good reports from Plaxo before venturing to try it again. If you read the internet, there are lots of people who got burned with Plaxo.
By and large my experience with Plaxo for syncing contacts between OS X and Windows has been very successful and the new version seems to cope relatively well with calendars in iCal and Outlook 2007. So far no real complaints, particularly for something that seems to work in real-time and is free.
Plaxo is a definate nono.. They spam the daylights out of your contact for weeks. I received 36 invites from one person who was stupid enough to use their services. I ahve also read articles on plaxo
s EULA including the right to use your contacts for their own marketing...
Maybe your plan is to have all of your friends hate you so much for the Plaxo spam, THEY pay your $65 Spanning Sync registration fee just to get rid of all the spam...
Plaxo has an un pleasant past, with contact management, but... they seemed to have turned the corner and refocused on sync. This is a brilliant idea as far as I'm concerned. Imagnine if everytime you joined a new social site you didn't have to find all your friends all over again, ou could just tell plaxo to sync it... as well as easy sync between mac, pc, phone, and online services. It's a great idea for a service, I hope they get the beta gears running smoothly soon (I am struggling with it myself still)
I have been very happy with gsync, and through it will cost me $20 at release 1.0, that is still much better than the $65 of Spanning, and I am not sure that I want an additional party to have my life info.
Plaxo no longer automatically sends "invitations" to your contacts. It asks you if you want to invite anyone.
I installed after reading this and sync iCal, Address Book, Gmail, Google Calendar, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Calendar with it and have been quite happy with it.