Goodbye BusySync. Hello… MobileMe?

Political consulting being my day job, I find myself from time to time needing to set up a “server system” for a campaign.

Needs are basic: Email, file storage and sharing and calendaring. Since spending money on a business-level system is not usually an option, I take advantage of Google Apps for Your Domain.

It works better than well, and I recommend it for even small businesses. In fact, my own consulting firm uses it for our email, calendaring and file sharing.

But the problem I had was getting Google, iCal and my iPhone to play nicely. Some of that functionality has since been added via Google, but not near enough.

So my answer was BusySync. For the majority of the campaign, all worked well. I loved the setup. It was so transparent that I never knew I was using a work-around.

But then that all changed. Some events started disappearing. Others started multiplying. It was weird and virtually inexplicable.

I toyed with it for a while, double-checked settings and visited the support forums. Unfortunately, I never solved the issue.

With the campaign I was managing via Google now over, I’ve switched calendaring back to MobileMe. My consulting partner and I share a calendar, then I have my personal calendars. Now, nothing disappears or multiplies.

We still use Gmail as an email server, though I use Mail.app. I’ll admit, however, that we’re not collaborating as much with Google Docs. Instead, we use DropBox to share what we need.

Before long, I may move drop Google Apps for Your Domain all together, but I just can’t bring myself to get rid of Gmail’s great archiving and spam fighting abilities.

So, goodbye BusySync. Hello MobileMe. And, well, we’ll see about Google Docs.