Over the past few months, I have oddly enough been asked to organize contacts and calendars between internet email, computer email, ipads, and iphones. As people seem to like what I setup and I know it can be very helpful, I thought I would share what I did to keep things organized across devices.
I personally have 4 places I need my contacts and calendars to be synced and I always prefer to not have to worry about any missing data, contacts, events. A while back, Apple and Google seemed to have a bit of a falling out and my iCal on my macbook pro would no longer delete any dates. So when I scheduled something and then needed to move it to a new time, when I moved it, instead of deleting the previous entry and making a new one, the old one would come back on along with the new one. Needless to say this became very frustrating. On top of this, when I began using the new iCloud service, I began having all sorts of duplicated contacts appearing in my gmail and phone. After sitting down and researching, here was my solutions:
Now you need to know I currently have/run:
-Macbook Pro (2 years old) running Snow Leopard (I haven't upgraded for certain compatibility reasons with some of the programing I run)
-iPad 2 16GB running iOS6
-iPhone 4S 16 GB running iOS6
-Gmail for my personal email which I do NOT sync with my apple Mail service using an IMAP setup
-Business email setup on Apple Mail using IMAP setup. Service through GoDaddy.com
CALENDARS
First of all my calendars I setup all through Google Calendars. The reason I chose this over Apple's setup through iCloud is that I use a few shared calendars that I share with some people who don't use Apple products. While iCloud is very cool for personal use, if you ever want to share anything with anyone else, they have to be apple users. In contrast, google calendars require a free google account. I share the tech schedule with our technicians so they are able to see what gigs are available and they have the ability to sign up for them. I daresay that google has a stranglehold on the calendar service.
On my snow leopard computer, I login to google via a browser to adjust calendar settings.
On my phone and ipad, however, don't use the gmail setting to get your calendars on your phone. For your email, go ahead and setup the standard gmail account but in the settings make sure Calendars is set to off. Instead:
1- Create a Microsoft Exchange account
2- Use your full gmail address and credentials for both the email and username.
3- Type your password in and for the server type in: m.google.com
4- Turn SSL on and feel free to rename the account to something other than exchange.
5- In Safari or another browser on your phone go to m.google.com
6- Choose the "sync" option in the icon list.
7- On the next page, click "Sign in with your google account" and use your google credentials to sign in
8- Next you should see a list of devices associated with your account (at least you should see the one you just setup) Select the device
9- Skip the Mail options and scroll down tot he section with "My Calendars". Select all the calendars you want to be able to see on your phone (You will be able to tell your phone to show or hide those calendars later so be sure to choose all that you MAY want to see and edit at some point.
10- When you are done push save and in a few minutes, your calendars should appear in your iOS calendar, fully editable and changeable!
CONTACTS
The contacts thing is a bit more interesting. I decided after much research again to sync everything through google as the central hub of information. While iCloud is great, my gmail is my primary personal email and I have about a decade of contacts in there as I have used gmail since it was in Beta. Again, while if all you use is apple products, then iCloud is fine, but iCloud won't sync with google...
I have 3 places that have stored contacts: My gmail contacts list, my Apple Address book (for business) and my cell phone (with many many years worth of phone numbers) My ipad only has info from one of the other three so nothing special was in there. What was driving me crazy is I had no access to any of the other devices contact info between my devices, OR, I had 2 or more entries for each person (needless to say, this made using Siri to do things very difficult as she often was confused as to who I was asking for!). Here is what I did to solve these issues.
1- First of all you need to export all o your contacts to vCards.
-In Apple Address book, select ALL your contacts and then go to file->Export->Export vCard (don't forget where you put it!).
-With your phone/ipad, backup your entire contact list to icloud. You can do this by going to Settings->iCloud. make sure "contacts" is set to "on. Then go to "Storage and backup" at the bottom and then down to "backup now". Once backed up, in a browser, go to icloud.com and login. Go to your address book and in the actions menu near the bottom, choose "select all" and then go back to the actions menu and select "export vCard. Don't forget when you saved it!
2- login to gmail on your browser.
3- on the left where it says "gmail" click and a drop-down should appear. Choose "contacts"
From here you can make a master "my contacts" list if you like or you can edit all your contacts in the master list (this may be a LARGE list though).
4- Either way, go to "more" and go to "import"
5- Using the popup interface, find your exported vCard file and import them into google (repeat for each export you did
6- ALL of your contacts should now be in google contacts including all your phone numbers and emails and whatever else you imported from anywhere else. Now the tedious part
7-Spend a few hours and go through deleting contacts you don't want (I would recommend doing this first. you can select a bunch at a time and then go to "delete selected contacts" in the menu.
8-After the hours it takes to do that, take a few more hours to merge duplicates. There is an option in googles menu to do this for you, however, I did it manually only because a lot of the email addresses didn't have names associated with them so google wouldn't have combined them. Nevertheless, if you take the tedious time it takes to do this once, you should never have to do it again. you can select a few different contacts at once and merge them. Also feel free to add addresses as it comes in handy when asking Siri to guide you somewhere from your phone or ipad. When you google contacts are PERFECT with numbers and emails etc, now we want to clear and sync our other devices:
9. On your iPhone/iPad, go to Settings->Mail Contacts and Calendars->iCloud. Turn the contacts option to "off". The phone will ask you if you want to delete all contacts from your phone. YOU ARE ABOUT TO ERASE YOUR PHONES CONTACT LIST but as long as you backed it up and set it up in google, you don't need to worry. Go ahead and select Delete contacts. Go to your contact list on your phone all contacts should be gone. If there are any contacts left, go back to the settings and do the same "off" setting for contacts in your other mail accounts.
10. When all your contacts are gone, go back to the Mail Contacts and Calendars and set the Exchange we have set for the calendars to "on" and magically (over a few minutes) your contacts you setup in google will import to your phone
11. To get synced with your Apple Address book on the macbook pro, open the address book, select all and push delete (BE SURE YOU BACKED IT UP EARLIER!)
12. Once all your contacts are gone, go to Address Book->Preferences.
13. In the new window select "accounts"
14. Check the "synchronize with google" option and then click "configure". Put in your credentials and save.
15. When you are done, close the preferences window and at the TOP of your screen in the system bar should be a two-arrowed circle. Click this and go to "sync now" once you do that, your contacts should all import from google and you are all set!
It may take some time to remake any groups and whatnot, but I can't tell you what a great help this has been to my productivity. I hope this helps someone else just as much! (Sorry this is so unedited, just didn't want to go back and read it all again!)
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