So far, all I’ve been talking about is syncing my Outlook calendar with another calendaring service — Google, Yahoo!, AirSet, etc. What about syncing the other calendaring service with my mobile phone (Windows Mobile 5)? That’s a whole different story … and syncing BOTH sets (Outlook to both another calendaring service AND my mobile phone) is yet another kettle of fish. Finding something that will allow me to do all of that is a bit of a challenge, particularly if I want to be able to sync OTA (Over The Air). See, that’s called a 3-way sync: mobile phone to Outlook, Outlook to remote calendaring service and remote calendaring service to mobile phone.
The best way I’ve found so far to sync OTA is ActiveSync but, as far as I can tell, that only works to an Exchange Server. Mail2Web.com has a free Mail2Web Live account that’s based on Exchange You can sync mail, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes — all of the things that you can sync with ActiveSync BUT it won’t sync with another Outlook — to get that functionality, you have to sync your mobile phone with your Outlook, so it’s a 2-way sync — and that’s what makes room for some of these other services. I’ve seen nothing that will allow me to sync Outlook to a remote Exchange Server, short of actually setting up Outlook to use the remote Exchange Server as its server and setting up your mobile phone to sync OTA (can you sync a mobile device to the same server both OTA and via ActiveSync? — I don’t know!). So, what’s out there for use as a remote Exchange Server? MSExchange.org has a decent chart comparing hosted Exchange services, as they’re really called, and Solutions Sherweb’s service actually only costs $8.95/month — not a bad price considering what you get (see their web page).
OK, I’m out of time again. I guess this is gonna be at least a 3-part series, instead of 2 — still have to cover the remote calendaring services that AREN’T Exchange-based.