Google Syncs Calendar with MS Outlook and Adds API for Contacts

The Mountain View-based company has it good, judging from the requests it has pouring in. People have long asked Google to synchronize its Calendar service with mobile devices and Outlook, and after a pretty long period of time it did just that. First came syncing with Blackberry phones, but today the proverbial olive branch has been shown to Microsoft, when Outlook finally got support.

Like all the Google features rolled out, it is still a work in progress, so right now, users can only synchronize their main Google Calendar. The syncing is defaulted as bi-directional, but should one want to change that, it's possible from the options dialogue or when the utility doing the hard work is installed. Google will install a small program, loading at startup and will wait in the system tray for the next synchronization, which usually takes about 2 hours, as reported by Ionut Alex. Chitu of Google Operating System.

Sadly, Microsoft couldn't be bothered to show the same courtesy and the new Internet Explorer 8 totally messes up the Google Mpas site, making it completely unusable, as Kirby Witmer noticed (screenshot on the left).

The second part of the big Google update today deals with an API for contacts, which allows client applications to view and update the Contacts as Google API data feeds. Some more syncing never hurt anybody, did it? "The Google Contacts Data API allows you to own your own contact data. We expect the API to be useful for a big range of applications," Sebastian Kanthak of the Google Contacts team wrote on the Google Code blog.

The problem Google always had, whether it should keep pushing its own services up front for its users or allow competition to land a punch in its stomach just for the users' sake, appears to have been solved. The contacts are not tied to a Gmail account, but to a Google account, making the release of a separate address book for those not using the Mountain View-based company's email service a distinct possibility.