Elephant in the room: Calendar Integration Useless to iCal Apps

[Kevin Mullet]

I love GQueues.  Each day, I integrate it more tightly into my daily activities.  It really is awesome. Bravo, GQueues folks!

I love the Google Calendar integration.  

I change something in GQueues, it changes in the calendar.

I change something in the calendar, it changes in GQueues!

Here's the 15-ton elephant in the room, and I troubleshot my problems with getting my private iCal link from the secondary Google Calendar for GQueues to sync in Outlook 2007 for three days before I happened on the screen after screen of requests from disenfranchised Google Calendar customers to fix this, all of which have apparently fallen on deaf ears:

Secondary Google Calendars iCal links DO NOT SYNC.
They initially populate,  but never sync.  If you want something like Outlook 2007 to have updated content in a particular calendar, you have to DELETE THE CALENDAR AND RE-CREATE IT.  insane.
Here's one of the many many threads about that topic:
http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/topic/calendar/uY_6Beo7UaY/discussion

The recommended "fix" is to move all items you want to sync to your primary calendar, and use the private iCal link with THAT calendar.

This is a huge failing, and since customers have been asking Google Calendar team for this to be fixed since 2009, I'm guessing it's safe to assume customer relief is nowhere in sight.

GQueues team -- please step up and offer a workaround.  Please (in addition to Calendar integration, or perhaps instead of it) make GQueues available as its own iCal link, that way apps like Outlook can sync directly with it instead of having to launder their information through dysfunctional Google secondary calendars.

Optimistically,

Kevin in Texas, a paying customer who now can't imagine life without GQueues.

[Cameron (GQueues Team)]

Hi Kevin - 

GQueues focuses on tight integration with Google products.  Unfortunately, right now developing and supporting integration with other products such as iCal or Outlook is outside the scope of GQueues.

With that said, I was able to get two-way syncing to work between my secondary GQueues calendar in Google Calendar and iCal on a Mac by using calDAV instead of just iCal links.  I'm not sure if Outlook supports calDAV, but perhaps it has something similar.

Directions from Google on how to set this up in iCal can be found here:

http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99358#ical

Here are the screenshots from when I set it up for testing.  Afterwards I was able to create new event in iCal on the GQueues calendar, which would then appear as an event in the GQueues Google Calendar and as a new task in my GQueues Inbox.   So give it a shot and hopefully you have the same luck.

iCal -> Preferences -> Accounts and hit the + sign to add a new account.

Server address is https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/YOUR...@DOMAIN.COM/user

Once created you can choose how often it refreshes.

Click on the Delegation tab and check off GQueues to get that calendar to display.

-Cameron

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[Kevin Mullet]

THanks for taking the time to post your detailed reply, Cameron.  I"m that'll help some folks, but  Outlook 2007 refused to accept that format of URL.  When using this URL to try and add the calendar to Outlook:

https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/kevin.mullet(at)themullets.net/user

(Outlook didn't recognize it as a valid calendar URL, but I've had luck in the past going to *.ics links in IE and having it use Outlook as a handler and pass it off that way, which is what I tried next...) and I got this:

That message above is what I constantly get, but the very first time I tried it, I did get prompted for login credentials and gave my full Google Apps userid kevin.mullet(at)themullets.net  and password, but then I got stuck here.  Could the fact that I'm google apps have something to do with this?

WRT not making coding to specific other apps a priority in GQueues, I completely sympathize, but I would think that priority timeslice would be given to coding to standards rather than specific software.  Along those lines, I would think that things like iCalendar and CalDAV would be standards you'd want to write to so that GQueues could interoperate better with other tools in the cloud and they could all be the stronger for it.

-KwM-