For those of you who have tried using MobileMe in a workplace setting, you may be as frustrated as I have been with the lack of groupware features. MobileMe does offer wireless syncing but does not give us very robust shared calendaring features. We could use Exchange, but since we are an all-Mac shop at SpinWeb, using an Exchange server for our email, calendaring, and contacts seems, well, dirty. Since we are using Google Apps for our email, it would be nice to utilize the rest of Google’s applications for groupware but it seemed that it was not possible.

This weekend, however, I discovered some new information that changed everything. The first major event was Google’s new feature of allowing two-way syncing of iCal to Google Calendars with CalDAV. Awesome! Now I can sync up iCal with my Google Calendar. Next, I discovered a great service called NuevaSync, which allows you to sync your iPhone calendar with your Google calendar. It also lets you sync your iPhone contacts with your Google contacts. And since the Apple Address Book already lets you sync your contacts with Google, we now have a total solution for mail (IMAP), contacts, and calendaring – all using Google Apps as the “cloud”.

This is great news, since MobileMe is somewhat broken and costs $99/year anyway. By using Google Apps, we now have a free solution that offers better functionality. I tested it out and it works great. I placed events on my iCal and they immediately showed up on my iPhone. Same with contacts. Who needs Exchange!