Known limitations with Google calendar provider

If BirdieSync 1.x constantly replaces your girlfriend's phone number with your mother's one, this forum is for you...
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Birdy
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Known limitations with Google calendar provider

Post by Birdy »

It is highly recommended to use version 0.4 (compatible with Lightning/Sunbird 0.8 ) since a lot of improvements were made in this version (full support of recurrent events for instance).

Google calendars don't accept attendees with email address which have a format different from the SMTP one (xxx@xxx.xxx for instance). So if you synchronize appointments whose attendees have a mail address like xxx/xxx/xxx for instance, that will lead to unresolved items.

If your appointment has an identical start and end date and time, it will be impossible to synchronize it from the mobile device to Google and it will lead to an unresolved item.

Slow synchronization:

A problem was identified with the developper of the Google Calendar Provider add-on. Google doesn't presently offer a mechanism to easily and fully access to a particular event which is necessary for the synchronization. So it was necessary to find a workaround to implement this missing feature from Google. This workaround implemented in the Google Calendar Provider add-on can take time, especially if the number of events in the calendar is important. A new enhancement request was made to Google and was accepted. But I don't know when it will be implemented and usable.
This slowness didn't exist in the previous version (0.3.1) because the Google Calendar Provided add-on didn't properly synchronize recurring events. The implementation of this new feature brought some slowness with BirdieSync because of the above limitation from Google. But it is now possible to synchronize recurring events. By now it is not recommended to synchronize a high amount of events.

Alternative:

Another alternative to the Google calendar provider would be to use gcalDaemon which synchronizes a google calendar with a local ICS calendar. And then to synchronize this calendar with BirdieSync. This solution is used by some users but was not tested.
Birdy

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