For syncing Exchange Outlook calendars and contacts to Gmail or Google apps domain, Gsyncit is my hero!
Here's the situation. I have a corporate email account on hosted exchange (Microsoft BPOS) and this is my work email, calendar, and contacts. I also have a Google apps domain for my personal email, calendar and contacts. I am a Google voice user and share my Google apps calendar with my wife. It is essential that these calendars and contacts are the same. I also have an iPhone that uses the exchange active sync connection and have to Goggle apps account setup for email only.
In the dark days of owning my blackberry, I tried to sync everything using the Google app on the phone. The results were disastrous. I had to undo the sync and restore from a backup. I also received errors all the time saying that the contacts and calendar were being synched by another program (Enterprise activated) and could not complete or a duplicate would be created.
This time around, I said that I need the application to reside my desktop to handle the issue. I searched and searched for something free to do this but could not find it. Add to the complexity that I am running office 2010 x64 edition. This only further narrowed my options.
After searching for a while, I found Gsyncit. (http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/). I read all about it and decided it was going to do everything I wanted it to. The app is $14.99, but very much so worth every penny. It took about 10 minutes to setup, and then I had some de-duplicating to do in contacts because the contacts between Google Apps domain and Outlook were already out of sync from me manually doing it when I remembered to. The de-duplication process to about 20 minutes. I have almost 300 contacts so not to bad.
But here's where I ended up after my $14.99 purchase and 30 minutes of work. All contacts and calendars are synched between the two accounts. If I make a change on my phone while I am on the road, it gets updated to corporate exchange. Then when I get back to the office, I load Outlook and all those changes are synched back to the Google side. I can also accept invitations from either of my accounts in any method I want. Then changes are synched later when Outlook is loaded on my desktop. Finally, since all my contacts are in sync, Goggle voice calls are very rarely unknown callers any more and I am no longer required to press 1 to accept the call of an unknown caller.
To be a complete nerd for a little bit, I have been trying to accomplish this for a very long time. I have seen Gsyncit for a while but really didn't want to pay $14.99. It has been a frustrating uphill battle to get these all in sync but now that they are, I feel major satisfaction.