SpanningSync
SpanningSync is a current media darling in the Mac world. For $25/year or $65 “Lifetime” they offer to sync your iCal on Mac to Google Calendar. I’ve been following SpanningSync since the earliest public beta and was excited about it — right up until they announced the price. Like many, I felt $25/year was way too much for what they were offering to do. Syncing to Google Calendar is great, but without task or address book syncing (both of which hinge on Google making APIs available), $25/year is more than I’m willing to spend on just calendar sync.
I’ve also been following the Spanning Sync blog as well as the SpanningSync Google Group. The latter is awash in reports of people who are having problems — but that is what one should expect of a support forum. People who aren’t having issues aren’t likely to sit around talking about how well things work, any more than you’re likely to go to the doctor and tell her how good you feel.
Plaxo
However, as I’ve read about people’s experiences with SpanningSync, several of them mentioned Plaxo. While Plaxo used to be just an address book, the new 3.0 version syncs address books, tasks, and calendars between Mac OS X and Windows. You can also sync Google Calendar, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and several more that I’m probably forgetting.
Plaxo 3.0 is tagged “Beta” but as has been said before “Beta” is not an excuse especially once you start charging money for it.
Plaxo Pro is $50/year if you have more than 1,000 contacts and if you want VIP tech support including the options for email and phone (more on that in a moment). See full details on Plaxo pro features but the feature that will get a lot of people to sign up (even if it’s just for the demo period is the “De-Duper” which will let you go through your address book and calendars to search for duplicates.
Having some 3,000+ contacts in my address book, I signed up for the Plaxo Pro 30 day trial.
The De-Dupinator
Yesterday I ran my Address Book and calendars through the De-Duper, and it’s really quite good. I had something like 7-800 duplicates in my address book, largely because I was previously syncing my Treo 650 to both Windows Palm Desktop, actually Agendus) and Mac OS X. (Note to fellow travelers: That way lies insanity. Avoid at all costs.)
Contacts
There are problems, however. I have 4 entries for “David Miller” in my address book which refer to 2 different people (father and son with the same name). The De-Duper tried to combine them into one person. No big deal, I clicked “Skip” for that person and moved on. It does a great job at merging data from multiple contacts, something that would have taken hours and hours and hours to do by hand. It will let you either accept their suggestions or manually make additional edits.
I had something like 700 duplicates, of which over 50% were identical duplicates. I went through the rest in the course of an hour or so, much better than if I had tried to do it by hand. That alone was probably worth $50.
Calendar
The calendar de-duper, however, will only find duplicates in one calendar at a time. For example, if you have an iCal calendar called “Home” and another called “Personal” and the same event is listed in both, the calendar de-duper will not find it.
To me this is a huge oversight, but I’d be willing to be that will be fixed eventually. However, as of 2007-07-17 it still exists.
Plaxo to Windows
As I mentioned, I was trying to merge together information from Agendus / Palm Desktop on Windows, my Treo, and iCal & Address Book on my Mac.
The most current information was on my Treo, so I sync’d it to Agendus / Palm Desktop on Windows.
First roadblock: Plaxo doesn’t sync to Palm Desktop. Fortunately, Palm Desktop syncs to the 800GB Gorilla: Microsoft Outlook. Of course Plaxo supports it and Outlook Express.
Plaxo for Outlook told me that it couldn’t connect to the server and told me to check my Internet connection, which was working fine for everything else.
I decided this was the perfect time to test the “VIP Phone Support” which connected me to southern India, according to one of the folks I talked with.
The tech was very helpful and knowledgeable. Using Internet Explorer and going to their support website, I was able to give him control of my Windows machine, which worked amazingly well. It worked through the firewall (I had to give expressed permission to let him) and NAT, and he could apparently see both of my monitors (I disconnected the second one to speed things up so he didn’t have to cover as much ground)
I could see what he was doing and he showed me around the program. The problem was solved by uninstalling and reinstalling the Plaxo software (ah, Windows).
(Aside: The funniest moment was when I saw him switch from “The All New Plaxo” to “Classic Plaxo” on the website, and asked him why he had done that. “I’m a bit more comfortable working in the classic version” he said, which got him huge bonus points in my mind for honesty. There is a feature, however, which is only in the classic side, which shows the count totals for calendar, tasks, contacts, etc. He showed me that Outlook and Plaxo were reporting identical totals. Sweet!)
After we got it working that first time, I did not test it much further. Syncing to Windows/Outlook is not one of my priorities, I just needed to get the information from my Treo / Agendus into Plaxo so I could sync it to iCal and Address Book.
Google Calendar
I setup my Google Calendar for Plaxo, which also seemed to work without difficulty.
(Aside: Plaxo syncs tasks as well as calendar items, but only where supported, i.e. it doesn’t sync tasks to Google Calendar, because there is nowhere to put them.)
Note that I was using a “Google for Your Domain” account, not a regular GMail account. That trips some programs up, but Plaxo seemed to handle it fine.
Mac and Plaxo
Then I tried to setup iCal and Address Book on my Mac.
The Address Book sync worked fine. Quick and painless.
However, iCal would not sync. No error was given, it just silently failed to sync up or down.
I remembered that I had seen Growl support earlier, and turned Growl back on. Still no errors.
Having had such good luck the first time, I called Plaxo back again. This tech was much harder to understand, and seemed to have a much harder time trying to understand me. This isn’t some anti-outsourcing “Well if they dun just spoke American we’d ah fixed it buh now” but an honest evaluation of the person answering the phone on the other side: very pleasant, tried very hard to help, but it was hard to communicate. If they offered IM support in addition to phone support, it might actually be easier since there’s no language barrier.
(Update: they do offer IM support, although I had to stumble across it to find it. They ought to make it more prominent. I think it is a good compromise between the speed of the phone and the clarity of the written word. However, when I connected to them and reported a Mac problem, I was told that the person could not help and they asked for my phone number so they could have one of the Mac engineers call me.)
I spent the better part of an hour on the phone again, mostly uninstalling and reinstalling Plaxo for Mac (an uninstaller is included) which I had originally mocked when I had to do it for Windows. At least in Windows I only had to do it once.
I’d reinstall and wait for it to sync.
Nothing.
Finally I had the idea to turn off Address Book syncing and just sync iCal.
And it worked.
Briefly.
<img src=”http://tj.tntluoma.com/files/plaxogrowlerrorsnippet.png” border=”0” height=”291” width=”269” alt=Plaxo iCal error” align=”left” hspace=”4” /> Now I am getting some weird error message (see image). I tried to see if I would get some other kind of error if I turned off Growl. I didn’t. Fortunately I was able to grab the screenshot of the error before it disappeared and emailed it to Plaxo.
Otherwise I’d have no error message to report at all. (As much as I love Growl, I think relying on it is a bad idea. If it is not installed and running, they need some other error reporting system.)
iCal refuses to sync, and gives that error over and over again.
I decided to go to bed and let it sit overnight.
This morning the error still exists and nothing has been sync’d.
More Problems
I logged into my Plaxo account and checked the Sync Log for Google Calendar and it showed that the last sync attempt had failed 8 hours and 44 minutes ago.
But at least they promised to try again soon.
What to do? My Inconclusion
Plaxo promises to deliver the online equivalent of the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth - and fails to deliver. And before someone waves their arms in the air and cries “BETA!” I’ll reiterate: once you start charging money, it’s released.
Plaxo Premium costs $50/year (see a comparison of the free and non-free here) and they aren’t accepting incomplete money, so having an incomplete program is, well, not an excuse.
However I have seen the promised land. If I could get Plaxo to work, to sync my calendar, notes, tasks, and address book between Windows and Mac and Google, $50/year would be completely acceptable. $1/week? Anyone with more than one computer ought to jump at that.
Windows — if by Windows you mean Outlook or Outlook Express — may be flawless. I don’t know and that’s not a huge deal to me.
Mac support is not yet ready for prime time. Using Growl is great, but if you don’t have Growl turned on, errors silently pass by, and when they do come, there’s no way to catch them before the Growl window fades.
I’ve heard the Mac SyncServices will get better in Leopard, and I’m sure Plaxo will get better with time as well. However, on 2007-07-17, if I needed to sync iCal with Google Calendar, I’d probably be looking much more closely at SpanningSync.
But… and this is a big one… there’s no way that I think SpanningSync is worth $25/year. What Plaxo offers (sync for not just Google but Yahoo and AOL and MSN and oh yeah, Windows, and not just calendar but tasks and address books too) is far more than 2x what SpanningSync is offering.
So I’m left with the $65/lifetime option. For that I could get a year of Plaxo, and lunch (well, lunch today not for a whole year). It would be enough to get us into Leopard, and (I’m guessing) into the non-beta version of Plaxo.
SpanningSync may offer address book syncing iff Google releases an API for contacts.
SpanningSync may offer task syncing iff Google releases an API for tasks.
Both of those APIs would appear to be “Duh” items that Google is sure to release eventually, but when? No one knows. Well, maybe some people know, but they aren’t saying.
Is it worth it to buy SpanningSync now for $65 and hope for task and address book syncing?
I’d say it probably is a gamble worth taking. SpanningSync would be committing seppuku to try and charge lifetime members an additional fee for those additions, knowing that most people signed on hoping/waiting for that to come.
It is, however, a gamble. You’re trusting that Google will announce them relatively soon and that you’ll save money by having less convenience right now.
Will Plaxo solve their Mac issues before Google announces contact/task syncing?
Is what Plaxo offers worth $50/year (assuming, like me, that you have more than 1,000 contacts). Because if you have fewer than 1,000 contacts, you can use Plaxo for free.
I’ve got a month to try out Plaxo Pro before I have to decide if its worth it or not. (SpanningSync would do well to offer a longer test period, especially given that they’ve had issues too.) Given that I’m already having some tech support issues, it will be a good test to see how they respond and if they are able to solve the issue.
For $50/year, I might go through my address book and see if I really need all of those people to be listed there.
In the meantime, the SpanningSync folks had better hope that either A) most people have more than 1,000 contacts, B) most people with more than 1,000 contacts are cheap, and/or C) Plaxo doesn’t get better Mac support.
(Plaxo tested with 3.0 build 356 on a Mac.)