Google's "Appreciated Gesture" Drives Record Sales of Spanning Sync

Last week Google introduced CalDAV support for Google Calendar, which, despite being a "developer release" which they "strongly suggest you restrict to test accounts only", got a lot of people thinking about syncing iCal with Google Calendar. But Google's solution is severely limited, and as a result we've seen record sales of Spanning Sync in the week since the announcement. (Thanks, Google!)

Here's a quick run-down of some of the problems our users have found with Google's CalDAV solution:

• iPhone incompatibility
  Calendars synchronized using CalDAV become read-only on iPhone. One of our biggest customers is in the process of rolling out 700 iPhones and 200 iPod touches. This lack of iPhone compatibility makes Google's CalDAV solution a non-starter for them, and for anyone else looking for bidirectional sync between iPhone and Google Calendar.

  Calendars synchronized with Spanning Sync are editable on Google Calendar, iCal, and the iPhone calendar, and changes made in any of those places will show up on all three (after syncing your iPhone using iTunes).

• Lack of customer support
  Sync is inherently complex, but most problems can be solved quickly with just a little customer support. Unfortunately, Google doesn't provide any. They've even said publicly that it's "not feasible" for them to respond to individual requests for support.

  At Spanning Sync, we provide support our customers have called "tremendous", "excellent", and "stellar", regardless of whose software is causing the problem: Google's, Apple's, or ours.

• Complex configuration
  Configuring iCal to use Google Calendar as a CalDAV server is not for the faint of heart, and to make matters worse, the process is different for primary vs secondary calendars.

  Setting up Spanning Sync is essentially self-explanatory.

• Lack of international support
  Google CalDAV doesn't support international character sets, so calendars in Japanese, Hebrew, Russian, and other languages are turned into gibberish.

  Spanning Sync has full UTF-8 support for non-English languages, and has been used by people in 58 countries around the world.

There are a number of other issues too, but these are the ones that have jumped out at us from our users' early feedback. Ars Technica sums it up well:

For those who need basic syncing between iCal and Google Calendar, this is an appreciated gesture from Google. Others who need more robust syncing of multiple calendars, reminders, and more, solutions like Spanning Sync … will probably still be a necessity.

But despite that, we're not resting on our heels.

Last week we introduced Save 5+Make 5, which rewards our customers for something they're already doing: recommending Spanning Sync to their friends and colleagues. We're also getting close to launching Spanning Sync v2.0, which adds contact sync and a host of other new features and improvements. And finally, we're already working on our next big project.

More on that soon.

Comments

[Neal Gafter]

All I have to say is: you're most welcome!

[Charlie Wood]

I almost said "Thanks, Neal!" but I didn't think many people would connect the dots. :-)

-c

[bradleypjohnson]

Another reason to choose SpanningSync over CalDAV:

If you sync Entourage and iCal, it creates a local calendar in iCal under "Calendars." When you set up an Account per CalDAV instructions, it creates a new local calendar in iCal under the Account name.

Unless I'm missing something, these two can't be connected/combined in any way, which renders CalDAV useless for Entourage users who want to get their events on Google Calendar...