As I write this, I’m expecting Jonathan Cliff to write a comment saying I’m making this too complicated and that I’m doing this all wrong, but I thought I’d share some of the technology frustrations I encountered today and how I fixed them.

One of the greatest leaps in technology in recent years was the ability to share my work calendar with my wife. No longer did we have to have long conversations of when I might be available, but instead, she’d just make appointments on my calendar for me.While I was on a PC, there were some good syncing apps between outlook (what I used) and google calendars (what she used). When I switched to a Mac, it got hard again. Then when we switched to Google Apps at Gateway, all was well. However, now my wife uses her iPhone 90% of the time rather than her computer.

For the past 18 months (at least), Sara has had an iPhone and she’s had access to my calendar and all has been well. However, for the past 2-3 months, she’s not had access to my calendar. I’m not sure what happened, maybe Apple or Google changed something. After about 15 questions in a row this morning about my calendar I snapped, “Don’t you have my calendar on your phone?” Not my finest moment. She reminded me that she’s been telling me this for months. Oops. So, I jumped on her phone to fix it quickly, but kept getting stuck and it wasn’t doing what I wanted. Here was the situation.

She has her gmail account on the phone and we’ve set it up under the Exchange settings. The reason for this is that using the gmail settings allows you to sync email and calendar, but not contacts. When you used the Exchange settings, you can sync email, calendar and contacts. What was important though is that once her gmail account was all set up, I could only seem to access her one main calendar. I followed all the steps I’ve done before by going to  http://m.google.com/sync and authorize your phone and select the calendars you want to sync, but it just wasn’t working at all. After messing around for a while I came to the conclusion that perhaps you can only sync one calendar through Exchange. Again, I could be wrong, but I just couldn’t get it to work.

The solution was to set up Sara’s email and calendars through the gmail settings. I was having problems getting  http://m.google.com/sync to work, so I ended up going to  https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect instead and picked the calendars that I wanted to sync. Once it all loaded, all the calendars came through perfectly. Ah, but what about her contacts? That was easy enough. I just set up another account using the Exchange settings and told it to only sync contacts. So in the mail/calendar/contacts, she has one account (gmail settings) for mail and calendar and one account (exchange settings) for contacts only.

Feel free to comment, maybe you know something I missed… or can explain why this was working just fine a few months ago, but isn’t anymore.