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Syncing Attendees Between Outlook and Google

When syncing attendees between Outlook and Google events there are a number of considerations that directly affect the synchronization of this information given the differences between Outlook and Google calendars.

1. For organizer & attendee information to be evaluated and synced the option to sync organizers & attendees must be enabled as shown below. Otherwise, this information is ignored and the event is treated as a normal event.
   
   
   
   
   
2. If your Google and Outlook email accounts are the same then organizer and attendee information should sync normally between the Outlook and Google calendars.
   
   One caveat is if the sync is unable to convert an X400/500 Exchange managed attendee to it's SMTP counterpart which is required when adding attendees to an Outlook event. In this case the attendee entry cannot be synced.
   
   Tip: Because of how Outlook handles accepting invites where it deletes and creates a new accepted event it is recommended to use the option to only sync meeting events that have been accepted . This avoids the scenario where the Google invite could be inadvertently declined as a result of Outlook deleting the original invite when accepted in Outlook.
   
   
3. If your Outlook account or Gmail email address is listed as the organizer then the event attendees will sync between the two calendars. This is most basic scenarios when syncing organizer + attendees.
   
   Please be careful here because if the Outlook and Google account email addresses are different you will create a scenario where the meeting shows as organized from two different email addresses.
   
   Consider the case where you reschedule the meeting from your Google account that was originally sent from your Outlook account using a different email address. The attendees will receive an updated email from the Google email account account instead of the Outlook email account that organized and sent the original meeting.  
   
   
4. If your Outlook account is listed as an attendee on the Outlook event then for the attendees to sync to Google calendar the Google email account must be listed as an attendee on the event. Otherwise, the attendee information will not sync and the event will appear as a normal event.
   
   Google calendar requires that the Google email account be listed as an attendee on an event for it to be treated as a meeting. To satisfy this requirement, the sync needs to add your Google account to the list of meeting attendees; Potentially for a meeting it was not originally invited to! This has an undesired side effect where the Google account now has the ability to respond to a meeting that is not on the event organizers attendee list.
   
   Imagine your Google account sending a meeting response to the organizer for an invite intended for your business Outlook account! 
   
   By default gSyncit will not sync the attendee list if the Google account is not listed as an attendee on the Outlook event. You can override this behavior using the option to allow the Google account to impersonate the Outlook account which allows the sync to assume your Google account is on the attendee list. This option should be used carefully.