Unofficial Technology

As with anything, if its a good idea, in the Mac community someone is either working on it or its already done. Such is the case with syncing my tasks with Exchange and iCal. There is some great by a group called Snerdware. They have two products that are especially interesting, GroupCal and AddressX. GroupCal syncs your Exchange calendar and tasks to the calendar of your choice in iCal. AddressX syncs the Exchange Global Address Book with Apple’s Address Book.I just installed both programs this evening and gave them a test spin. GroupCal read my exchange account even though I am external to my network (requires Outlook Web Access). All of my calendar events came across flawlessly. My tasks were a bit quirkier. There were many tasks that were duplicated. I’m not sure why that was, but it was easy enough to clean up. AddressX worked flawlessly and quickly. It downloaded approximately 900 entries from the global address book in under a minute.The unfortunate thing about iCal and GroupCal, and this may be a limitation of the iCal specification, is that my task categories won’t come across. What would have been nice would be to map different task categories to different iCal calendars. I’ll have to put in a request to the folks at Snerdware.However, probably the most important thing is done. I have my Exchange tasks, and they are in any widget that uses iCal. I personally use DoBeDo.Harmony approaches.