Blackberry, Outlook, and Google

So a coworker just got the new Blackberry curve 8330 from Verizon Wireless. The phone is really a nice little phone. The UI is well designed and easy to use. Now our company doesn't allow employees to sync with the Blackberry Enterprise Server, unless the phone is a company issued phone. This creates a problem for those employees that don't have the option to get a company phone, but are willing to purchase the phone and pay for the service.

Since our company uses MS Exchange, syncing the email with Blackberry is pretty easy, but there is no why to sync the calendars.

So after digging around online I found out that there is a program, by Google, that will sit on your computer and sync your Outlook calendar with a Google calendar. Unfortunately your computer does have to be turned on and connected to the internet, luckily most of the time our computers are. You can have the program sync 2-way or 1-way (either direction). You can also set it up to sync as frequently as every 10 minutes.

Now there is another program, by Google, that will sit on your Blackberry and sync your Blackberry calendar with your Google calendar. There are various settings on this end, but the default settings seem to work just fine.

This so far is the best solution I have seen, without paying extra for a sync service. If there is anyone out there that has a better solution, then by all means please respond.