Feature Suggestion: Change All Events To Private For Sync

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I have read in the Spanning Sync 3.1.1 ReadMe and a couple of other
old threads in this group that iCal does not support Private events.
Furthermore, Google Calendar Sync (for Outlook) appears to sync down
events with their original classification. As far as I have found,
there's no way to globally change the class of all events to be
Private. Outlook 2007 also doesn't seem to have a non-scripted way to
do this, and the events would be overwritten anyways given my sync
setup.

I have a sort of unholy calendar sync flow. I use iCal as my master
calendar, and use Spanning Sync one-way up to Google Calendar. I then
use Google Calendar Sync one-way down to Outlook 2007, which then
syncs with Exchange 2003 so I can populate it with my free/busy time.
The issue I have is that iCal doesn't let me set events to be Private.
Thus, it would be awesome if Spanning Sync had an option to do so.

Thanks!

[Larry Hendricks]

I didn't feel that enough people would benefit to justify adding UI
for this, but there is now a "back door" that you can do using
Terminal:

defaults write com.spanningsync skipClassification -bool true

Afterward, iCal's "classification" property just won't be sent to
Google. Instead, any new gcal events will just inherit your default
public/private setting (which can be changed in Settings).
--
Larry Hendricks
la...@spanningsync.com
http://spanningsync.com

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Hi Larry,

I am starting to think that an event synced up to gcal does not
inherit public/private settings as far as gcal Sync is concerned when
it syncs down to Outlook. Events created in iCal arrive in gcal as
Default, but are synced down to Outlook as not Private.

I have tried to rule out any data corruption by using Spanning Sync's
"Start Over…" option. I also deleted the gcal it was syncing to, and
all appointments from Outlook before re-syncing. I verified that
skipClassification = 1; is set. Doing a "fresh" sync results in the
same outcome as described above.

It seems that it would be great if Spanning Sync could explicitly
change the classification of iCal events to be Private before they are
uploaded to gcal. (Or we need a Spanning Sync for Win/OL that respects
gcal's public/private settings. :) Events that are classified as
Private in iCal (e.g. imported .ics) ultimately retain their
classification when they are synced to Outlook.

Thanks!

On Jun 14, 11:26 pm, Larry Hendricks <larh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I didn't feel that enough people would benefit to justify adding UI
> for this, but there is now a "back door" that you can do using
> Terminal:
>
> defaults write com.spanningsync skipClassification -bool true
>
> Afterward, iCal's "classification" property just won't be sent to
> Google. Instead, any new gcal events will just inherit your default
> public/private setting (which can be changed in Settings).
> --
> Larry Hendricks

> la...@spanningsync.comhttp://spanningsync.com

[Larry Hendricks]

New events synced to Google Calendar without the classification
property will definitely inherit Google's default public/private
setting. However it sounds like you have a slightly different issue
where you want Outlook to set events to private by default. With the
skipClassification flag set, Spanning Sync won't sync the private/
public classification at all so at this point you're just dealing with
the behavior between gcal and Outlook. But you're right-- *forcing*
the classification to private would do what you want (unless the event
originated in Outlook in which case you might get a conflict).

I don't know of any other users running into this so I don't want to
make any promises about supporting a forced mode. It's too bad Outlook
just defaults to Public. Instead, they should just avoid syncing the
classification property at all.

--
Larry Hendricks
la...@spanningsync.com
http://spanningsync.com

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Hi Larry,

I solved my problem on the Outlook side. I found a third-party sync
utility for Outlook that has an option to sync down events from gcal
without details. Thanks for your help!

P.S. Byron also recently provided me with great support to figure out
that I had to delete my SyncServices db, which apparently got
corrupted after I updated to 10.6.4.

On Jun 15, 8:26 pm, Larry Hendricks <larh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> New events synced to Google Calendar without the classification
> property will definitely inherit Google's default public/private
> setting. However it sounds like you have a slightly different issue
> where you want Outlook to set events to private by default. With the
> skipClassification flag set, Spanning Sync won't sync the private/
> public classification at all so at this point you're just dealing with
> the behavior between gcal and Outlook. But you're right-- *forcing*
> the classification to private would do what you want (unless the event
> originated in Outlook in which case you might get a conflict).
>
> I don't know of any other users running into this so I don't want to
> make any promises about supporting a forced mode. It's too bad Outlook
> just defaults to Public. Instead, they should just avoid syncing the
> classification property at all.
> --
> Larry Hendricks

> la...@spanningsync.comhttp://spanningsync.com