Rating: 4/5

General Info: While syncing is often a sticky issue, Spanning Sync does it transparently and flawlessly. What Spanning Sync synchronizes is iCal and Google Calendar events. What’s so powerful about Spanning Sync is its bidirectional syncing. Bidirectional syncing means that data created, edited, and deleted on Google Calendar will be synced with iCal, and vice versa. Spanning Sync can sync automatically every 10 minutes, 30 minutes, hour, day, or week (also in addition to, or instead of, manually syncing). You can also chose if calendars are synced, and which opposing calendar they’re synced to. Syncing is entirely transparent except when when Google Calendar changes a certain amount of iCal data (normally 50%). Besides the increased accessibility, Google Calendar adds a more convenient way to add shared or third-party calendars; such as holidays or concerts. Through iCal, Spanning Sync allows you to sync Google Calendar events to your iPod, iPhone, or other mobile device.

In addition to the previously mentioned features, Spanning Sync needs some more. One that I really missed was a way to merge calendars. Say I had two Google calendars of national holidays and religious holidays (no, not Apple), Spanning Sync could then merge them into one iCal calendar called ?¢‚Ǩ?ìHolidays?¢‚Ǩ¬ù. What I feel Spanning Sync is missing most is a way to sync to-dos with Google Calendar. As Google Calendar lacks to-dos, Spanning Sync doesn’t sync them at all. Still, Spanning Sync should take to-dos with a due date from iCal and make them events in Google Calendar (similar to this). One item bothering many potential buyers of Spanning Sync is its cost. Because Spanning Sync is commonly viewed as an application, rather than a service, a yearly fee or one-time, expensive “unlimited license” is commonly seen as overpriced. Exacerbating the situation further is the ridiculously low prominence of the prices and plans available on Spanning Sync’s website. Spanning Sync works great, but could use some more features and better prices (by about $5-15 less).

Retail Prices: $25 per year or $65 unlimited

Site: http://spanningsync.com/

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Reviews, Software, Utilities, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.