Syncing Calendars

There are tons of tools out there for syncing up a given calendar with another, but how do you take two different Outlook domain calendars and sync them up?

For example, as a consultant I have an email account with my company and a different email account with the client I’m working with. It is important for those that want to schedule meetings with me be able to see my calendar and availability. Unfortunately those within my company can not see my client calendar and vice versa those within my client domain can not see my company calendar. What tends to happen is that I get meeting requests that conflict with something on the other calendar and events on my client calendar don’t pop on my Windows mobile device the way my company appointments do.

What is one to do so these can sync up properly so others can see my availability and I can get all the necessary reminders vibrating on my hip?

I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to sync up that doesn’t have gaps. I came up with a few options:

1. I could forward meeting requests from the client to my company email.

There are a couple of issues with this. Firstly when I open the forwarded meeting requests on the company side they don’t have an accept/decline/tentative function so I need to manually drag them over to calendar and specify all of the same criteria. I might as well just have created it manually there in the first place. Secondly it only works for meeting requests, not appointments. This option does however keep he company calendar filled with my appointments I have visibility there and get my reminders even if it does have extra manual sync work involved. It still doesn’t let the client side know that I have other meetings taking place.

2. I could “redirect” the meeting requests from the client to my company Email.

This gives the accept/reject/tentative functionality that I would expect.  It seemed to work ok until I noticed that the meeting is only showing on one calendar. Again the company side could see the synced version but now the client side looks empty.

3. I can sync both Outlook calendars to my Google Calendar.

Google offers 2-way sync via a sync tool you can download to your desktop, unfortunately it only works well in a 1 to 1 basis. That is 1 Google Calendar to 1 Outlook calendar. Instead of using 2-way sync I’ve enabled both my Outlook calendars to sync up to my Google calendar to have a unified view there. Then I enabled Google Calendar to send me SMS reminders on my mobile 20 minutes before events. The syncing worked well as I had events from both calendars populated.

The SMS, not so much. It fired once never to fire again, I’m not sure what’s going on there. The additional draw back here is that no one can see my Google calendar to schedule meetings, or would know to look there if I shared it, so in terms of the external user view, it’s still disjointed. If I could specify multiple calendar 2 way sync this might work better.

As of now I’m still looking for a free solution. Anyone know of a good/easy/fast way to sync two different Outlook accounts on different domains without me having to create the code myself?