I used to host my own email server for my personal email. That quickly became a pain so about 4 years ago I migrated to Google Apps and haven’t looked back. Recently, my wife has been on me to start sharing her Gmail calendar with her. Apparently, I’m not very good with remembering dates 🙂
I did some quick research on the matter and it seemed pretty simple. I had her share her Gmail calendar with me and her calendar immediately showed up as a ‘Other Calendar’ in my Google Apps calendar on my desktop. Now for the hard part, getting it to show up on my iPhone. There are lots of posts on the matter, but it seemed that all I had to do was browse to this URL in Safari…
https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/<your domain name>/iphoneselect
from my iPhone, put a check next to the shared calendar and hit save.
Not so.. I waited a long time and the new shared calendar never showed up in my calendar list on my phone. In a moment of frustration, I decided to setup a duplicate email account on my phone but use the ‘Gmail’ account type option rather than the ‘Exchange’ type option. Presto! I set it up using my same credentials and told it to only sync the calendar. So now my accounts look like…
Note that I left my original Google Apps account as is which appears to let my ‘primary’ calendar still sync. For some reason, I needed to add the Gmail account in order to get any shared calendars on my phone.
Frustrating, but it appears that the ‘Exchange’ mail type doesn’t support syncing shared calendars. I’m wondering if it has something to do with the fact that I’m on Google Apps and my wife is on regular Gmail.