Syncing Google Calendar with Corporate Exchange Systems

With the advent of smart phones, and with tablets becoming more and more ubiquitous, getting all of your information to play nicely together can sometimes be tricky. For those who use Google Calendar and also rely on Microsoft Outlook (yes, this is fairly common) for their personal information management, there's a great tool in Google Calendar Sync to get your appointments flowing between these two applications.

However, I've discovered that when you are working in a corporate environment using Exchange Server the calendar sync tool doesn't work well with meeting invitations. It took me a while to hunt down the solution for this, so I thought I would document it here in case any of my readers are struggling with this issue.

If you're running Outlook and using a corporate Exchange server, you will need to add your corporate email address as an additional email to your Gmail account. To do this you log into Gmail, click on "Accounts and Import" and then on "Google Account Settings". Click "Edit" under "Email Addresses" and then enter your corporate email address under "Add An Additional Email Address" and click "Save". Your corporate email account will receive an email with a link that you will need to click to verify this setting.

Note: be sure to check your company's I.T. policies prior to doing this, some companies do not allow this type of access to their network and it's important to verify that setting this up is authorized in advance.

It may take a few hours for the sync to start working (it took over 12 hours to work in one instance), however you will soon start seeing your corporate meeting invitations showing up in your Google calendar.

I'm not sure what it is in the sync mechanism that won't allow meeting invitations to sync over without adding the email address that the meeting is sent to, however this solution seems to resolve this issue nicely (though I was unable to find it in the Google documentation.)

I hope this helps you get all your information where it is most convenient for you to view it!