Best way to sync google contacts/calendar

Question

Just bought iPad2, and am wondering the best way to sync my contacts and calendars from google to my MacBook and iPad (my mac and phone sync to google and need to add ipad). My MacBook doesn't have Lion so I'm guessing that I wouldn't be able to keep it updated via iCloud at this point? Is iTunes the best way to go until I update my Mac?
Thanks!

Answer 1

The methods do different things
Push notifications just tell you an Item has been updated and will give you the ItemId of that item. You then need to get that item and work out the changes
SyncFolderItems and Pull Notifications are very simular in that they provide a list of updates the underlying Sync mech is a little different Watermarks vs SyncState. In comparison to Push notifications these will consume more bandwidth and require more
requests to the server.
>Using Filter and FindItems
Would just require more requests to the server to do the same thing. However no matter the method you use it will still require you bind to the Item that is modified using GetItem to work out what's changed etc and all these method have challenges around
getting deleted items. The underlying code for Pull notifications and SyncFolderItems is petty simple my suggestion would be you write a test application yourself to see.
Saying which is better really depends on what your trying to achieve. Eg if need to make the most minimalistic number of requests to the server then push notifications would be best to track changes see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn458791(v=exchg.150).aspx which lists the differences in bandwidth.
Other things you need to consider are throttling which maybe not a problem OnPremise but will be if you move into the cloud or Office365.
Cheers
Glen