AMR's Joint: blog? what blog?: offline google calendar for thunderbird users

Monday, March 01, 2010

offline google calendar for thunderbird users

like many, i've been sucked into the google bubble and regularly use gmail, google calendar, google reader and blogger. unfortunately i do not have a smart phone so my big issue is what do i do when i have my computer, but no internet access? i do still have a paper calendar, but it's pretty time consuming to put in every single event, so i generally use it to record things when i'm away from a computer, and then add to my google calendar when i get back into the cloud.

to resolve this problem, i looked into ways of accessing my google calendar data while offline. the official fix (using google gears) was unsatisfactory, as it only provides read only access. ideally i would be able to add events while offline, to be sync'd automatically once back online.

a little digging came up with a solution which hopefully has been around long enough for me not to run into any problems. i already use thunderbird to manage my work and offline gmail email, so it did not involve too much extra effort. the details were reported in a comment by Mike on March 26, 2009 on this post at bfish.xaedalus.net. it seems to be working well so far, so we'll see how it goes!

You NO LONGER need to have the Provider addon installed in Thunderbird to have bidirectional Google calendar support. Just the Lightning addon. Google Calendar now supports CalDAV and it’s very easy to enable bidirectional updating of your Google Calendar from within Thunderbird. Follow these instructions, remembering that Sunbird is the actual name of the Thunderbird calender.

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99358#sunbird

Remember, you’ll want to make sure you have the Google calendar box checked in left hand column of the calendar view in Thunderbird to have the Google calendar show. Also, very important. When adding an event from Thunderbird, you must specify which calendar you want the event to show up on. By default, this is set to the “home” calender. Click the drop down to select your Google calendar. This must be done or the event will not sync back to Google Calendar. Also, I set my Lightning calendar refresh to 5 minutes, which allows for faster updating of the calendars.

Labels: gcal, google, lightning, mozilla, sunbird, thunderbird

amr's brain blurted out at 1:43 PM

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Comments (2)

Hi AMR

I just been trying this. I cannot however make appointments when offline. Lighting states an error occurred. I can however read my appointments.

Is yours working ok?

Madrunner

By Anonymous, at 1/27/2011 1:06 PM

Hi Madrunner,

As far as I know it is working correctly, although I have not had a need to make appointments offline in several months. When I originally installed this fix I tested it and it did work ok so I wonder if there was an update that broke it. I can't right now but will do a test.

-AMR

By amr, at 1/27/2011 5:15 PM