Setting up a shared Google calendar for more than one iPhone
Last week I bought my wife her first iPhone. Despite the fact she seemed less than enthusiastic about it, she’s been doing a good job at learning how to use it. One thing I noticed was that she’s been using the Calendar app to remind herself about things. I got the idea of figuring out a way for the two of us to share one calendar so that we can have reminders of what we need to do.
At first I wanted to use the MobileMe calendar sharing, but to add her I have to pay $50 for additional accounts. Also, it seemed from what I researched that you cannot sync a calendar for collaboration among several people in your “family”, they can only subscribe read-only. No, thanks.
Since we both have Gmail accounts, I looked into using Google Calendar sharing instead. I didn’t want to because I was under the impression that by doing so you’d wipe your contacts out of your phone in favor of Google’s Exchange settings. It turns out that’s only if you set up your Exchange account to sync your contacts. You don’t have to, you can leave that option off.
By turning off Contacts, you keep your MobileMe contacts on your phone. I personally find this quite unsettling because I’m afraid that one swipe of my finger can wipe out my entire contacts list. I’m too afraid to try it to see if it at least warns you that it’s going to happen.
When you create a calendar on Google, one is created in your name (eg: starman.me@gmail.com). If you’re making a shared calendar, it’s probably best to create a new one with a better name for who you’re sharing it with. Once it’s created, you can add people to have access to the calendar, and set permissions for them. My wife has full read/write access to our family calendar.
However, you’d think that would be all you need to do, right? Unfortunately, no. I couldn’t figure out why the shared calendars weren’t showing up on my iPhone, only my own personal one. After doing a lot of digging, I finally figured out that you have to go to http://m.google.com/sync and there you tell Google which calendars you want Exchange to show you. Note: This should also help non-iPhone users as well.
Now everything’s synced and we have a shared calendar. Apparently I’m going to be very busy next week.
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Comments
thanks for the detailed instructions. however, I'm not sure how to reproduce the last step: “go to http://m.google.com/sync and there you tell Google which calendars you want Exchange to show you”
where do I do that?
For me the page http://m.google.com/sync did not show the expected information, instead telling me that Google sync does not work for my mobile device.
It turned out that the Language selection (defaulted to German for me) was doing this. By using the “Switch Language” option at the bottom of the page and selecting “English”, I could set up the calendars to be synched…
hey, thanks for the hint, I forgot to mention I had the same message aftre following the link above. 'll try that later today…
This is what I use as well. Remember that if you create a new event and want it to be shared, make sure you tell the phone which calendar you place it in, otherwise you can't go back and edit it without deleting it entirely.