How to sync Windows Mobile with both Exchange and Google

For Windows Mobile phones, Google suggests that you use the ActiveSync program on the phone to connect to one of their servers. This is problematic in principle for me, since ActiveSync allows only one connection with a server to be configured, and I need that to stay synced with work email. It also didn’t work even when I experimented, first with ActiveSync, and later with Funambol’s WinMo client.

What did work was the free GMobileSync client. The 1.3.7 beta version supports multiple Google calendars, but one cannot select to sync just a subset of them, nor are secondary calendar events shown any differently than events from one’s default calendar. (Suggestion to GMobileSync: Allow defining a 2-letter uppercase code per calendar in device settings; strip these when syncing back to the server so they don’t appear to have changed.) It doesn’t sync contacts, but that feature is said to be coming. And syncs can’t yet be scheduled to happen automatically (but you can get CT Scheduler Lite free and tell it to launch the sync, but then you still have to press the Sync button — there is no parameter to automate that part yet; to install, download to a machine where you have admin privileges, or email them for the CAB file).

As part of your move away from Microsoft, at least on the desktop, you may want to use Mozilla Thunderbird+Lightning to manage your Google Calendar.

You may also want to try FinchSync with GCalDaemon.

If you want to try it the way Google suggests, you might need help from this and this (from these matches) and use Funambol client for WM with these settings:

Server URL: https://m.google.com:443/syncml

User: [yourname]@gmail.com

Password:[your gmail password]

If you really want to use ActiveSync with two servers, it’s said to be possible, but one must first find a way to edit the device’s registry:

So, to sync two exchange servers, put this in the device’s registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftActiveSyncEnableNonLocalCrossPollination]
= (DWORD) 1

This key will most probably be there already, but if it is, its value
will be 0. If so, change it to 1.

Soft reset, then, setup activesync ON THE DEVICE (If you try setting up
on the PC, it will still fail).

There are also paid services that are geared to people who want more features or who want to avoid doing all this IT work themselves:

  • http://www.scheduleworld.com/
  • http://www.goosync.com/
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