It sounded simple: sync the shared Google calendars for my company to my iCal calendars on my iPhone.
My first experiment ended disastrously with all my iPhone’s iCal calendars being overwritten. Luckily I restored the data by exporting my iCal calendars from my home iMac (i.e. the mothership for calendar syncing).
It turns out Google Calendar uses the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol, so this unidirectional approach removes “all existing contacts and calendar events” from your phone. However, if you aren’t trying to sync multiple calendars from two sources this should work.
After playing around with some alternatives, my final solution:
1) Export all my iCal calendars and upload them to Google Calendar (My Calendar / Settings > Import Calendar)
2) Add a subscription for my soccer team’s game schedule (living on the brilliant TeamSnap site) to my Google Calendar account
3) Share my work calendar with the btrax team
Now I had all of my own calendars in one place (personal, work, soccer and shared colleague calendars). My iMac could slurp them up, but not add its own evens to the mix.
Getting everything the last mile to my iPhone and making the syncing bi-directional was the fuzzier part (few directions on this from Google):
1) Go to m.google.com/sync on your iPhone and log-in to your Gmail account
2) You should get a Google Sync page with the subtitle “Manage Devices” which shows your iPhone
3) Click the iPhone entry and select up to 5 calendars (including “private” shared calendars!)
4) Click “Save” at bottom
If I add an event on my iPhone it now instantly and automatically loads it to Google Calendar’s cloud servers (just make sure to select a specific Google calendar, otherwise it won’t sync). Whenever I boot up iCal with either my iPhone or iMac it also checks my selected calendars for updates.
And that’s it. There is no easier magic bullet yet, but this does a lot of heavy lifting without requiring you to jailbreak your iPhone.
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