This is a continuation of sorts from my previous post.

I’ve been trying to find a good way to get my wife and I to be able to see each other’s calendar information on our iPhones.  The more I got to thinking about it, the more I thought that I’m pretty close already and just need to put the final pieces in place.  Here is what I did.

1. Use Google Calendar to share calendar information.  We each have our own Google Calendar accounts and simply share our calendars with each other.  That’s a simple enough feature of Google Calendar. 
2. Sync the Google Calendars with Outlook.  I’ve been syncing my personal and work Google Calendars account with my Outlook account for a while now.  I use SyncMyCal to do the calendar syncing.  I like using SyncMyCal because it lets me select any of my Google calendars to sync with any particular Outlook calendar.  To get my wife’s calendar info, I did pretty much the same thing.  I simply created a new calendar in Outlook and set up SyncMyCal to sync my wife’s shared Google Calendar with this new Outlook calendar.
3. Sync the calendars with MobileMe.  Sure I could use the traditional iTunes approach, but MobileMe is just so much more convenient for this.   Now when MobileMe syncs my Outlook calendars with my iPhone, I get my wife’s calendar info sync’d to a new calendar entry on my iPhone.  Nice!  Remember – all calendars under the main Outlook “Calendar” calendar will sync when using MobileMe.

So far I think this approach is working great.  I’m essentially using Google Calendar as the main “calendar in the cloud”, if you will.  From there, everything just gets sync’d up.

My next step will be to set up my wife’s iPhone to do calendar syncing with my calendar data.  Now that I have an idea of how to do it on my phone and Outlook instance, setting up hers should be a snap.

One of the big features of my iPhone that I love is the ability for it to sync calendars with Microsoft Outlook.  For a while now, it has also been one of the most annoying.   Apple has very little documentation, as far as I can tell, that describes in any detail how the iPhone syncs with Microsoft Outlook.  All Apple says is that it does.  But how?  How can I control the calendars in Outlook (I have several) the iPhone will sync with?  How can I control the calendar colors on the iPhone?  After a few nights of digging around blogs and forum postings, as well as a good amount of time experimenting with my iPhone and Outlook calendars, I think I can finally answer the questions of which calendars sync, and how to control the colors.

First, what calendars sync?  From what I can tell, when using iTunes to sync an Outlook calendar to the iPhone, you can request that all calendars be synced, or just selected calendars.

However, if you use MobileMe to sync calendars, it appears you loose control over what calendars will sync.  When using MobileMe, all calendars will sync.  You can no longer select which calendars you want to sync.  So it is a trade off – you get slick over-the-air syncing with MobileMe, but you can not control what syncs.  If you want that, you have to be tethered to a USB cable and iTunes. 

I also should point out that MobileMe seems to sync all calendars under the “Calendar” folder (inclusive).  When I moved my “Home” and “Work” calendars to be at the same level as the “Calendar” calendar, MobileMe wouldn’t recognize them.  All my calendars had to be sub-calendars of “Calendar”.  Odd.

This worked.	This did not work.

Second, how to control the colors of the calendars on the iPhone?  From what I can, by default, the iPhone will pick a random color from a set of predefined colors.  There seems to be no way to control the calendar colors from the iPhone or iTunes.  That just seemed moronic to me.  So, I went on a hunt.  I found some blog postings that mentioned the iPhone would pick up the calendar color defined in the iCalendar it synced with.  Well, since I don’t have iCalendar, but instead Outlook, that didn’t really help me.  But, I thought that maybe what Apple is doing with iCalendar they’re also doing with the calendar in MobileMe.  So, I made sure I had set up my iPhone to sync calendars with MobileMe (thus giving up control of what calendars to sync).  After the first MobileMe sync, I checked the calendar colors on my iPhone.  No change – they did not match the calendar colors in MobileMe’s calendar.  I decided to change the calendar colors in MobileMe and try again.  Magic!  The calendar colors on my iPhone now match the calendar colors I defined in MobileMe’s calendar.

Hopefully this helps others who are struggling with calendar syncing between Microsoft Outlook and the iPhone.  If you have any other suggestions or tips, please let me know by posting a comment.