Google Sync and MobileMe Together on an iPhone?

[ManhattanPrjct]

This is going to be a somewhat convoluted situation, but I don't believe there's been any precedent (at least that I could find on this site):

I currently use all of Apple's organizational tools (Mail, Address Book, iCal) with MobileMe. I have an iPhone and naturally MobileMe is the gatekeeper between my Mac and my iPhone.

However, I am about to join a new small company that uses Google Apps for everything. I know that through Google Sync my "company" calendar/contacts/mail can interface with my iPhone, but can they work at the same, and by that I mean, will everything be naturally kept separate?

Now, to follow up on that statement, would there be a way to keep my calendars separate, for instance, but actually sync my contacts across MobileMe/Google Apps/My Mac? I figure that should be possible somehow. I am basically going to try to build a wall to keep some things separate, but I would like my contacts to be uniform across the board.

All constructive input welcome.

 

[d21mike]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

I did part of this. I setup both on my iPhone to get both email but only selected contact and calendar sync from one of them. Set the other to NO.

 

[ntrigue]

Conceptually, iPhone only allows one ActiveSync server. In your instance you're desire is to keep business and pleasure in succinctly different categories. Easy answer is two phones.

Mail will be relatively separate. You'll need to be careful that the outgoing email address is appropriate.
iCal is a free for all where only color-coding can separate your appointments. Although you can turn a particular calendar off when necessary.
Contacts is the tough one. They are all dumped in there. Again you can assign groups, but...

 

[Internaut]

Ok, I might be missing something blindingly obvious from the OP but.... I have both an Exchange Account (my employer) and a Mobile Me account on my iPhone and it does maintain them as perfectly separate calenders (i.e. a xxxx@me.com calender and work.com calender).

Are you saying you want the two to work together? I don't think you can combine them as such. There is something a little odd in Google's description of Google Sync which can be found here:

http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740&topic=14252

It says "Perform a sync with iTunes to ensure that Contacts and Calendars from your iPhone are backed up to your computer."

Now, I think this assumes you simply have a local iCal calender synced with your iPhone, in which case it would sync to Google using the Exchange protocol. If you're calender is actually set up against a Mobile Me account, you should be ok.

Nothing I ever do in Exchange ever shows up in Mobile Me. Likewise, nothing I do in my Mobile Me calender ever shows up in Exchange.

 

[ManhattanPrjct]

Conceptually, iPhone only allows one ActiveSync server. In your instance you're desire is to keep business and pleasure in succinctly different categories. Easy answer is two phones.

Mail will be relatively separate. You'll need to be careful that the outgoing email address is appropriate.
iCal is a free for all where only color-coding can separate your appointments. Although you can turn a particular calendar off when necessary.
Contacts is the tough one. They are all dumped in there. Again you can assign groups, but...

I'm not really interested in two phones - I was hoping my iPhone could handle it all.

Regarding contacts - I'd actually like perfect synchronicity between Google, Address Book, and MobileMe. This should technically be possible, right?

 

[ntrigue]

You'll want to choose a primary. Immediately I would suggest forwarding all MobileMe email to the Gmail address. How often do you add contacts? If infrequently you can just sync at home each night and use the built in option to keep Google Contacts synced to Address Book.

 

[ManhattanPrjct]

For email I am not too concerned.

Regarding contacts, let's say I have four different ways to input a contact:

1. My iPhone
2. Address Book on my home Mac
3. Work PC (synced to Google Apps)
4. Google's Contact list

I'm trying to figure out if I link my Address Book to Google and my Work PC to Google, will there be synchronicity between my contacts at all points (and therefore to MobileMe) if I use any one of those methods to add a contact?

I also want to avoid a "circular" situation here, if you know what I mean.

 

[d21mike]

For email I am not too concerned.

Regarding contacts, let's say I have four different ways to input a contact:

1. My iPhone
2. Address Book on my home Mac
3. Work PC (synced to Google Apps)
4. Google's Contact list

I'm trying to figure out if I link my Address Book to Google and my Work PC to Google, will there be synchronicity between my contacts at all points (and therefore to MobileMe) if I use any one of those methods to add a contact?

I also want to avoid a "circular" situation here, if you know what I mean.

You have to have a way to Sync with MobileMe. Your Address Book on your home Mac could Sync with MobileMe. My work pc run's Outlook so I Sync Outlook with MobileMe via the MobileMe Preferences. I also Sync my Outlook Contacts with Google because I was doing some stuff with Google and wanted my Contacts their. I Sync my iPhone Contacts with MobileMe. However, I could Sync my iPhone Contacts with Goggle via Google Sync if I wanted. I have been playing with Google Apps to compare to MobileMe. For me I like MobileMe Email better then Google Email but I like Google Calendar better then MobileMe Calendar. Contacts for me are about the same.

 

[frimple]

The solution that I found was to keep my separate accounts at each and let the applications handle the display of both.

For example, I've got 3 calendars sync'd to my iPhone. My personal (MobileMe) and 2 business calendars synced via the google sync piece. Contacts are the same as well as email.

Calendars are great because you can view "All" calendars on the iPhone and on the Mac. Contacts are a pain, you can't view "All" without seeing duplicates, and of course there's no unified inbox with email.... yet!

BTW, you might end up despising google contacts as much as I do. If you send an email to someone they're added as a "contact", so all the craigslist postings I send a message to from one of my business accounts are added as a contact. It's seriously annoying.

------------ EDIT ------------

My solution for contacts was to just keep a unified list in MobileMe. It's a manual process, but I don't add a lot of contacts outside of my "Personal" or mobile me account a lot anyways. It's a conscious effort though to make sure when you add a new contact that it's a MobileMe contact and not a google contact. I've pretty much written off my google contact list all together. My reasoning is that if I'm contacting someone it's either from my iPhone or my Mac so I don't really need google to keep a list of info for me.

 

[ManhattanPrjct]

The solution that I found was to keep my separate accounts at each and let the applications handle the display of both.

For example, I've got 3 calendars sync'd to my iPhone. My personal (MobileMe) and 2 business calendars synced via the google sync piece. Contacts are the same as well as email.

Calendars are great because you can view "All" calendars on the iPhone and on the Mac. Contacts are a pain, you can't view "All" without seeing duplicates, and of course there's no unified inbox with email.... yet!

BTW, you might end up despising google contacts as much as I do. If you send an email to someone they're added as a "contact", so all the craigslist postings I send a message to from one of my business accounts are added as a contact. It's seriously annoying.

------------ EDIT ------------

My solution for contacts was to just keep a unified list in MobileMe. It's a manual process, but I don't add a lot of contacts outside of my "Personal" or mobile me account a lot anyways. It's a conscious effort though to make sure when you add a new contact that it's a MobileMe contact and not a google contact. I've pretty much written off my google contact list all together. My reasoning is that if I'm contacting someone it's either from my iPhone or my Mac so I don't really need google to keep a list of info for me.

I am not really worried about calendars for precisely that reason - the iPhone allows for multiple calendar support. However, I am almost positive that it only allows for one contact list.

Regarding CL - I have a separate email I use for CL responses/postings, so automatic adding isn't a huge concern.

Isolating MobileMe is a good thought, but I will be adding a lot of contact cards from "work," which means they'll sync out to Google, and then onto my iPhone (if I use Google Sync). If it works like that, and indeed there is only one iPhone contact list, wouldn't it just automatically sync onto MobileMe (since my iPhone is linked to my MobileMe with over-the-air sync) and then sync down to my home computer?

 

[Internaut]

If you have more than one account set up, Contacts by default gives you a global view but if you look at the top left of the iPhone's screen, there is a groups button. Click this and you will be offered three or more groups:

-All Contacts
-Account 1 (i.e. your Mobile Me account)
-Account 2 (i.e. your Google account).

So the iPhone certainly keeps track of which accounts your contacts are associated with. I don't know how loose that association is though. If you delete an account, do the contacts associated with that account also get deleted? I don't know the answer to that one.

 

[Randomtandem]

What about Nuevasync?

ManhattanPrjct, not had chance to read all the permutations offered by others by I *think* I have what you need, by using http://www.nuevasync.com, which emulates the Exchange syncing in iPhone.

Mobileme
- Two calendars: one for family stuff and one for personal projects
- Contacts list, split by Groups
- Don;t really use the email but its active

Nuevasync
- sync one calendar from my email account in Google Apps account (ie not basic gmail but will work with this too); lets call it newco
- can sync up to 9 calendar accounts I recall, for team working
- sync with *seperate* contacts list for the newco biz
- thers is a premium Nuevasync account but I can't justifiy it yet

Also
- I have two Google apps mail accounts with seperate domains, that sync normally over the air via IMAP

It works a treat and gives two seperate contact lists, which I think you want.

But I want more! And would love on suggestions on the following:

Q) I want to sync just one/few (ie not all) of my mobileme contact groups with one of my Google accounts
A) Seems that Apple don't allow this for some dumb reason. Any ideas?

Q) Have a shared 'company' email list for my newco, to share within team
A) Neuvasync does allow this if you use a shared email account in your Google apps domain (ie allofus@newco.com say); you can use and even edit contacts on iPhone etc. Sweet. BUT I dont know how to set this up so I can access these additional contacts via Mac Mail (& Outlook which a colleague uses) - without this it severely limits the groupworking value

Q) I really like Nuevasync (if they see this) BUT their website looks pants and they don't seem to have developed much commercially since I first used. Are my contacts etc safe with them? Does anyone have a different experience of them?

Thanks!

 

[ManhattanPrjct]

Actually, my situation was resolved with iPhone OS 3.0 (though I had no idea until I tried it).

I have MobileMe (personal contacts, calendar, email) synced over the air. I use Google Sync (through Exchange) and I guess OS 3 allows for multiple contacts lists now, so they are kept separate. The calendars are separate as well.

My only complaint is that Google Sync is a total battery hog. I actually stopped syncing mail through Exchange and switched to IMAP, and even then it's still a drain.