I had a friend of mine recently ask me about synchronizing outlook to outlook but on another computer.  I must admit that I originally thought “why is that a problem, I use outlook on 3 or 4 different computers and they’re always in Sync”.  Then I remembered that Outlook works well for me because of exchange.

Exchange makes working with outlook easy because all the core information (emails, calendar, contacts etc) are all stored in one place on the server and then exchange takes care of pushing the right information down to Oulook as and when it’s needed.

But what if you don’t have outlook (like my friend).  What if you only have outlook installed on both your desktop computer and your notebook computer and you want to keep them in Sync?

Google to the rescue!

Google have a suite of Sync product to help with these sort of things, however there is one catch.  To do it properly you need to manage your email through Google which will just fine if you have either a POP3 email account or a IMAP email account.

One thing to consider – It’s probably a good idea to backup of your existing emails and calendar in Outlook before starting just to make sure you don’t lose anything.

Step 1

Create a Google account, it’s free and takes just a few minutes.  This will also give you a gmail email address however if you choose not use it then that’s fine also.  Start here.  If you already have a gmail address or a Google account then on to step 2.

Step 2

Tell Gmail to manage your email.  In this step you are going to give Gmail your normal email address account details.  Login to Gmail and then go into the “Settings” and then “Accounts and Imports”.  Click on the “Add POP3 Email Account” button and then follow the steps.  Gmail will now check your email for you and put all your email into the Gmail account.

Step 3

Turn on IMAP support in Gmail.  On the “Settings” page in Gmail, go to the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” page and click on “Enable IMAP”.  Follow the instructions to setup up Outlook on both your desktop computer AND your notebook computer in the same way.  IMAP is a special email system that keeps things sync’d between a server computer (Gmail) and one or more client computers (Outlook).  If you wanted to you could point your iPhone at Gmail as well and keep in Sync while mobile.

Step 4

Sync your calendar with Google Calendar.  Install this application on both your desktop and notebook computer and set it up to Sync with your Google calendar.

It sounds like a bit of work but it should only take you about 20 mins to get it all setup.

Let me know how you go.