Improvements for Google Apps Users Running MS Outlook

Many Google Apps users continue to use MS Outlook as their email/calendar software of choice.  The Google Apps Sync for MS Outlook makes this easy, and has recently improved.

• New Calendars: If you create a new calendar in MS Outlook, the new calendar will be created in Google Apps and will Sync.
• Multiple Calendars: You can now sync multiple calendars from Google Apps to Outlook.  The sync will include all calendars for which you have write permissions and that are not hidden in your Google Calendar list.
• Free/Busy with Dual Delivery: We often configure dual delivery — where email goes to Google Apps and Exchange at the same time — so that we can migrate users  in groups and phases.  When running in dual delivery and other Google Apps/Exchange mixed environments, you can now query free/busy information from the Exchange server.  To do so requires installing a free connector and a registry key on each client,  a service that is included in our unlimited support package.

Recurring Meetings Get Sophisticated in Google Calendar

Being able to schedule recurring meetings is a convenience, but managing them can be problematic when changes are needed to one or more of the sessions.  Google Calendar has gained new capabilities to deal with this dilemma.

Here are the details.

• In Calendar when modifying an event, when you change the time, title, description, location, or attendees of an individual meeting in a series, that meeting now remains part of the series.
• If you change the title, description, location, or attendees of a series of events, these changes will be applied to all events in the series, including those that have overridden fields. However, Calendar will intelligently keep track of what fields you override, and not change those fields e.g. if you change the location of one particular event instance in the series, then later modify the location for the entire series and give it a new title, the one particular event will be updated with the new title but the location will remain at what you had overridden.
• Changing the time or frequency of any series still resets all information in the series, even those that have been manually overridden.
• If you make any changes to a series and apply to “All Following”, it will reset all information in all future meetings, and the future meetings will be become a new distinct series.  This will override any fields that you may have manually overridden.

These features make it easier to manage recurring meetings.