Google Apps and iCloud woes – sync match not made in heaven

So Apple released it’s new iCloud service not so long ago, a fantastic upgrade to Mobile Me, which some considered to be disastrous, so much so that it led to the demise of certain leading development team member positions at Apple. For the regular home user, iCloud is fantastic. It sync’s your contacts, calendars, emails, and even photos over the air to your own “iCloud” storage space, and then to all of your mobile and computer devices. Great? Absolutely…EXCEPT!

In comes Google Apps small to medium sized business users. Google has implemented Microsoft’s Activesync protocol for a good few years now, using the service to provide a true “sync” experience for your Google Apps business email, contacts, calendars, and notes. This also keeps your information sync’d across multiple devices including your computers.

What happened?

Google has discovered that since the introduction of iCloud to the Lion 10.7.1 upgrade on Mac operating systems, Google calendar items just began DISAPPEARING RANDOMLY! After massive troubleshooting, Google has determined it is the fault of iCloud sync protocols. There is no resolution to this issue to date, so Google has stopped allowing deletion of events from Apple’s popular iCal software. What does this mean?

This means, that business Mac users who are on Google Apps, can no longer rely on their iCal application to fully manage their calendars. They must login to the web portal that Google provides and manage and delete items from there. As a tech, I have found this to be cumbersome for my users, but necessary.

Google posts:

Setting up iCloud sync caused events to be unexpectedly wiped from Google Calendar for some of our users who were syncing information between iCal and Google Calendar. This unwanted deletion took place between 10/11 and 10/14. We have since restored deleted events and invitees. Please note we’re only able to restore invitees who are Google Calendar users; guests who are non-Google Calendar users (i.e. Outlook users, Yahoo! users) could not be recovered and will need to be re-invited manually.

In response to the above issue, we have stopped deleting events if the delete request comes from iCal. Until further notice, deleting any event in iCal on Mac OS will not remove this event from Google Calendar, but all other requests like creating events or changing existing events will be synced properly.

As a workaround, we suggest you remove events in the web version of Google Calendar (calendar.google.com) – all changes made in the web calendar are properly synced to your iCal.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions here on this post!

Google Enhances Local Business Listings

iPhone Tech Tips - Screen rotation lock trick

How to prepare your office for a large storm

Small Business Tech Tips

Brought to You by the Folks at Everonit.com