Saturday, August 1, 2009

How to Sync Goldmine with your iPhone (or any phone that syncs with MS Exchange)

Since 2002,I've been syncing my personal calendar and contacts from Outlook to my Palm OS PDAs, Window Mobile OS phones, and now iPhone. It wasn't until the last few months that I cut the Outlook "cord" and put all of my info in the cloud.

However, ever since my new job, I've been more and more tied to my work calendar which we have in Goldmine. This isn't convenient though, as I'm rarely in office to manage my appointment. Since I live by my iPhone, I was looking for a solution to sync my work calendar (only) with my personal calendar.

I wanted to avoid any monthly fees that normally come with such software and services. A while back I figured how sync my Google Calendar with Nuevasync, an MS Exchange service. I synced my Google calendars (Mine, wife's Son's, etc all through Google Calendar) This is great as we can all edit, view & manage our calendars either on our phones or on Google Calendar itself. What was missing was bringing in my Goldmine calendar in amongst my personal ones.

After much research, I purchased CompanionLink Pro, and I am able to avoid a monthly sync fee. Even the people at CompanionLink were impressed at my connection. Admittedly, it's a bit hodge podge, but it works, doesn't cause duplicates and is pretty much instantaneous.

Disclosure: I don't work for any of the companies mentioned. I don't sync contacts from Goldmine, only my calendar. So there's my back-story.

Here's how my data flows:

This article assumes you have Google Calendar already in action. (some do use Outlook at work for email at work but we do not.) CompanionLink can sync and route data through many programs, but this is how I use it.

I highly recommend that you create a "work calendar" in your Google Calendar for goldmine and companion link to sync to. I tried bringing my appointments into my personal calendar but ended up with duplicates.

If you have questions on actual step by step set up, I will be happy to publish another article with screen shots. Please email me or leave a comment!

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