As you know, I’m a big fan of the iPhone, in part because of the simplicity of the user interface.  You don’t often get lost in a sea of advanced features and configurations – they simply aren’t there!  While this is a relief most of the time, once in a while you run into something tricky.

For me, it’s been syncing calendars between Deanna and I.  We each use Microsoft Office Outlook on separate computers, and view each other’s schedules using the built-in calendar publishing features there.

However, now we each have iPhones, and while the iPhone can handle multiple Outlook calendars, it doesn’t pick up shared ones for some reason.

After a bit of research and some ineffective fiddling with Google calendars, I found a simple and elegant solution:

Sign up for a free account on Plaxo.  Plaxo is a social networking site but you don’t have to use those features to take advantage of a great multi-calendar sync solution.  On my computer I downloaded the Outlook extension that synchronizes my local calendar to one I created on Plaxo called “Jonathan”, and on Deanna’s computer I did the same with a calendar named “Deanna”.  Then I just configured the respective Outlooks to synchronize with these new calendars.  Voila, now we each have a native Outlook calendar synchronized to each other.  In iTunes you can enable synchronizing these now-native calendars to the iPhone.

The Plaxo experience is very smooth, even when I got an error message on the first sync, it automatically tried again after asking whether it could engage a more verbose logging mode (which it will shut off automatically after a few days without further error.)  And it scales out to Google, Yahoo, etc. calendars as necessary.  Two thumbs up so far!