So, Plaxo finally decided to charge all the freeloaders by making Calendar/Contact sync part of their Pro package for about £30 a year.
I’m not going to moan, its a defendable position, but I don’t want to pay for a Pro package that I’ll only use a small percentage of – the real USP for me, is the sync capabilities.
Until recently I had Plaxo happily syncing my work calendar and contacts on Windows XP with my home contacts and calendars on Mac, with my syncing to my mobile device. The Mac does a good job of de-duplicating contacts (no need for Plaxo Pro deduper) and you can colour-code your calendars if you’re into that sort of thing.
What I thought would be a real hassle, can be easily resolved with Google Calendar Sync and Soocial for contact sync. Here’s how I changed my setup.
Google Calendar Sync
Install on Windows XP – the latest version works for me (previous versions didn’t).
It only sync’s your primary Outlook Calendar with your primary Google Calendar.
I didn’t want all my personal and work appointments merged, so on Google Calendar I created a new calendar for my Personal use and import/exported my existing appointments into that new one, leaving my primary Google Calendar empty and ready to accept work appointments.
Click sync on the Google calendar Sync app and you’re done
On the Mac, just set up your iCal with your Google Calendar as a CalDAV account and it already works nicely.
Soocial
Create a Soocial account and install the Windows XP application for Outlook.
The setup is really easy.
One gotcha to mention is that Soocial may create duplicate contacts depending on how your Outlook contacts are filed.
My Outlook filed people as “Smith, John” rather than “John Smith” which led to duplication on the Soocial website (and the de-duper tool didn’t pick these dupes up).
The only solution I could find was going through my whole Outlook address book and making sure all contacts are filed as “John Smith” then dupes are not created (bit of a ballache if you have lots of Contacts
iPhone
If you need to sync the iPhone, you might need to enable contact sync in the preferences of iTunes.
Finally, just uninstall the Plaxo apps you may have installed previously for Windows and Mac – its nice to get rid of the Mac app, which was particularly nasty – and delete your Plaxo.com account.
unless of course you are interested in Plaxo as a Social network…
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