How to get event created in iCal to use Google Calendar notification settings?

[chgboyd]

I use Spanning Sync to sync my iCal and Google Calendar accounts, and
the Google Sync to sync my Google Calendar with my iPhone.

All seemed to be going well, except that while Spanning Sync says that
it will sync alarms, I haven't been able to get it to successfully do
so.

Since iCal doesn't allow for calendar-specific alarm schemes, and I
have MANY different Google Calendars with very different (and
specific) alarm schemes, I'd really like to use THOSE schemes, as
opposed to relying on iCal's limited alarm ability (i.e., only one
"default" alarm allowed, and it applies to all calendars).

The problem is that when an event is created on my Google Calendar via
the Spanning Sync syncing process, the event doesn't automatically
adopt the notification settings of the specific Google Calendar in
which it's created. In fact, it has no notifications whatsoever.

I thought this was working fine before, but all of a sudden I realized
that I was missing a lot of alarms on my iPhone, and figured out that
the alarm schemes weren't getting applied when the event was created
via Spanning Sync.

Is there something I'm missing in terms of settings? Or is this just a
design limitation of Spanning Sync?? Please tell me it's the former!

[byron.shaheen]

Hi,

If events that are sent to Google Calendar through Spanning Sync are
not getting a default Google Calendar alarm set, there is something
wrong with Google, not Spanning Sync. It's Google Calendar that
should be setting the default alarm to any new events, so I'm not sure
what's causing that problem. You might try checking the Google
Calendar Discussion groups to see if anyone else is experiencing the
same behavior. I'm sorry I don't have a better answer for you.

-Byron

---
Byron Shaheen
byron....@spanningsync.com
http://spanningsync.com

[chgboyd]

Thanks for the response, Byron. 

That makes some sense, but I have to say, I'm still a bit confused: Spanning Sync must have some mechanism for prioritizing sync information, right? In other words, are you suggesting that anytime an event is created in another application, it will acquire the notification characteristics of THAT application, rather than maintaining the original notifications? That doesn't seem to mesh with what actually happens. When I originally create an event in Google Calendar, and it syncs to iCal, it maintains the original notification scheme from Google—it doesn't acquire the notification scheme from iCal when it's "created" by Spanning Sync in iCal. And vice versa. Which is kind of my problem.

Because Google Calendar allows for a much more robust system of default notifications on a per-calendar basis, I can set default notification schemes for each calendar—so that, say, my "Birthdays" calendar notifies me (by default) 7 days in advance, so I can send a card, whereas my "Appointments" calendar notifies me one hour in advance so I can get on the road. What I would like ideally is to dictate which system's notification scheme is used when syncing, so that regardless of where the event was created (whether in iCal, Google Calendar), the event would use Google's default notification scheme for the particular calendar on which it is created.

Does that make sense? If so, that does seem like it might be a Spanning Sync issue, and not an issue of how Google Calendar (or iCal) originally creates events. Of course, this all may be my misunderstanding of the way the syncing process works. If so, maybe you can explain?

-Celeste