RE-INSTALL.Several desktop email clients can be used to connect to Gmail. NOTE: If you already have Novell ZENworks installed on your system, DO NOT. The process will be similar in other, recent versions of the Mac OS.In fact, any IMAP or POP mail program will work with Google for email, but Outlook for Windows has the best advantage thanks to a program called Google Apps Sync which can handle synchronization of email, calendar, contacts and notes.Click the Find Outlook File option and then click the Look In option and then choose. For those who would rather use a familiar email program instead, there are a number of options Outlook, Apple Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird (Mozilla is shifting gears away from Thunderbird development, but this client will still continue to work indefinitely). To fix this, click on Go > Applications > Microsoft Office.The Gmail web-based interface is one that requires some getting used to - even Google admits that. For some reason a compatibility issue exists where after you wake your Mac from sleep mode, Outlook 2011 might keep asking for your email password. Another thing Outlook 2011 for Mac has a problem with is the App Nap feature. Here's the warning tale of one company's experience using Outlook 2011 with Google Apps.Outlook 2011 and App Nap.
![]() Get Outlook 2011 Update All ContactsNote that the Mac Address Book is sort of the highway for contact transmission it was decided that Jill should update all contacts in Outlook 2011 so they could then be copied to the Mac Address Book, Google, and her iPhone/iPad.After we conducted the migration all seemed well at first. In all three instances the data would be copied back and forth between Gmail and her Mac. Set up the local iCal calendar application to synchronize with Gmail (the Outlook 2011 calendar cannot communicate with Gmail, unfortunately)Figure A shows a diagram of how this set up worked.This meant Jill could use Outlook 2011 for email and contacts while utilizing iCal for her calendar items.![]() It was hard to tell what the exact issue was. Complex problemsA few days later Jill contacted me to report she suddenly had over 100,000 contacts! As it turned out, something eerily akin to a Gemino Curse from the Harry Potter universe was afoot.I found multiple entries of many contacts, and one apparently bad contact in particular it seemed a corrupt item had spawned itself over and over again. One happy outcome, right? Wrong. She had about 5000 contacts, and these existed in the Mac Address Book and Outlook 2011. My passport for mac to pcIt was tough work deleting the duplicates from both programs there is an option to do so in the Mac Address Book but it was glacially slow and seemed to keep freezing without results (probably due to the sheer number of entries involved). I shut off Sync Services in Outlook 2011, which was synchronizing contacts with the Mac Address Book, then unlinked the Google account in the Mac Address Book. I then located the corrupt contacts and removed those, along with a few others that looked questionable.It was then a race against the clock to do the same cleanup work on the Mac in both the Mac Address Book and Outlook 2011, in order to keep the duplicate contacts from flowing back up to Google. This had to be rerun several times, but eventually the 100K contacts were reduced to the original 5000 or so. Most likely, something was sending the bad contacts in BOTH directions, in an exponential algorithm akin to 2x2x2x2x2x2.I cleaned up the duplicate contacts in Jill's Gmail account, using the "Find and Merge Duplicates" option. Possibly Outlook 2011 was duplicating these contacts to the Mac Address Book like an assembly line gone haywire. I restarted Sync Services to get the Mac Address Book contacts into Outlook 2011, and this seemed to work. All the contacts came down properly. I restarted contact synchronization between Google and the Mac Address Book. There is a product called Scrubly which claims to be able to remove duplicate contacts in Outlook 2011 but we opted not to pursue it for what we hoped would be a one-shot fix.We were back to where we had started, basically all the known good contacts were at Google and the Mac Address Book program was empty. A different approachWe knew Apple Mail could be used instead of Outlook 2011 for email, but email wasn't the problem - that was working fine. I'd come across some discussions of this before we started down this road, but since other comments indicated people were able to get this to work we felt it worth pursuing. In a nutshell, Google, Microsoft and Apple denied responsibility for any problems using Outlook 2011 with Google. Research indicated a logjam in ownership of this issue. Sure enough, they did.What was next? I ran through the same process as above to remove the duplicates, but left all contact synchronization off. If the duplicates returned, we'd know this was the source of the issue. She was aware of the difficulties maintaining two email addresses, including replies from each, and opted to notify her contacts that her me.com address was her new primary address any emails forwarded to her from her Google Apps account could be replied to from the me.com account without concern.In the end you could argue we were spared further incidents via a "deus ex machina" stroke of luck, since Jill had been seriously considering an all-Apple environment for her technological needs anyhow. It wasn't so much that she felt Google was inadequate, but she was looking for an "all in one" solution.We took care of this, and set up forwarding from her Google account to her me.com account. Instead Jill voiced her decision to move her mail, calendar and contacts over to a dedicated Apple me.com account and use iCloud for the synchronization of all elements. Ultimately we didn't find a solution, but we found a workaround, and keeping the wheels of the business turning was the ultimate goal. This was a good lesson of the necessity to simplify as much as possible, to eliminate as many variables and potential leaks in the communication pipes. Is it up to Apple to figure out where the issue with the Mac Address Book and Google synchronization? Was it Microsoft's fault for not providing a way to connect Outlook 2011 to Google via an Exchange link, the same way Outlook for Windows can? Does Google get a slice of the blame for not supporting the Outlook 2011 client or are they to be praised for their wisdom in keeping their hands off the matter? Was the problem caused by the number of Jill's contacts and some issue such as a bad field buried among one of them?These are questions that could be debated endlessly.
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