The Best Tool to Sync Outlook and Google Contacts

If you are using Gmail with Microsoft Outlook, you know how cumbersome it is to keep your Outlook address book in sync with Google Contacts. You add a new contact in Outlook but it won’t magically appear in Gmail. The same is true when you edit a contact’s details in Google Contacts, your Outlook will continue to have the old data.

Would you therefore like to save yourself from this never-ending hassle of maintaining contacts data at two places and have a unified address book.

Sync your Gmail Address Book and Outlook Contacts

Google offers a free Outlook plugin called Apps Sync to help keep your Outlook Contacts and Google Contacts in sync with each other but probably for business reasons, they have made this utility available only for premier Google Apps customers.

I wish Google could bring the Apps Sync utility to regular Gmail and non-premium Google Apps accounts but until that happens, you may want to give GOSyncMod a try. This is a standalone Window utility, not an Outlook plugin, that can help you easily sync your Outlook and Gmail address books.

Once you have installed the utility, just provide your Google Account credentials and choose any unique name for the profile field (say Outlook). You may sync both Gmail accounts and Google Apps for Gmail accounts.

Next choose the direction for synchronization. For instance, if you choose “Google to Outlook only,” it will fetch Google Contacts from the cloud into your Outlook address book while keeping the Gmail Address book intact. I kept this unselected to sync both ways.

In case of a conflict, you may either give priority to Gmail, Outlook or let the program prompt you (see next screenshot). One limitation is that it Go Sync cannot handle conflicts on its own and you’ll have to manually compare the conflicts and update the one that is old.

The other impressive thing about this utility is that is can even sync profile pictures of your contacts both ways – this is missing is most of the other synchronization tools that available for syncing Outlook and Gmail. Thank you BlogsDNA.