Google have released their Outlook Sync tool for Premier accounts. This is designed to sync your email, contacts and calendars from Outlook to your Google Apps Premier account seemlessly and almost instantly.
We downloaded it this morning and are currently playing with it but so far it does appear to be much better than most of the other Google import tools available. Up until now the usual way to use Outlook with your Google Apps Premier account was to use IMAP as well as possibly the Google Calendar Sync tool. Outlook has never been the best IMAP client around and when used with Google you do see more oddities than usual, particular in the areas of folder structure (labels in the Google parlance) and general responsiveness. The Google Apps Outlook Sync tool aims to get around these issues by using it’s own protocol to sync email, contacts and calendars between Outlook and Google. It sits in the systray and updates changes almost instantly.
We are currently importing an 8GB mailbox to see how it handles it and so far it’s been pretty good. Initially we thought it was struggling with the import as the sync tool kept throwing up alerts about not being able to sync items, and then the sync appeared to hang. The only way to restart the sync was to restart Outlook and this in turn caused duplicate items to appear in Outlook. However in reality all that had happened was that the alert had caused the sync tools icon to stop rotating which gave the impression of the sync tool having stopped. Leaving the sync tool alone when these alerts appear eventually results in the sync continuing normally. We were particularly impressed that the duplicate items were currently handled later on in the process and all but one of the duplicates removed.
The proof of the pudding will be in the long term use of the Google Apps Outlook Sync tool but so far it certainly looks to be faster and more reliable than the old IMAP connection.
You can download the tool here https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync
Part 2 of our quick test can be found here
