How to create a calendar in iOS?

Is it possible to have a common calendar, capable of being viewed as well as updated, respectively, both from Outlook on the desktop (actually Entourage on osx) as well as on Google Calendar from mobile (AND on both IOS and android!)?

• I know i know, insane kluge; but i suspect many have similar if less overwrought issues: I'm a longtime Outlook user who went Mac several years ago, but for whom continuity and easy access back to dates and people from the mid/late '90s is important; and for starters THAT transition didnt go too well particularly in regards to contacts. As mobile hit, if Microsoft had given me ANY viable way to bring outlook to the iPhone for email/calendar/contacts, i'd have stuck with it -- but that didnt happen. Meanwhile for about 8+ years my personal anchor email has been gmail which i'm sticking with, which makes me inclined to anchor myself on google calendar as well. But what a clusterf*k. I'm sure the best solution is to suck it up and depart from Outlook/Entourage altogether, taking what i can into the next world (manually if necessary)-- but google's networked apps, especially email/calendar, don't come close to the client based Outlook/Entourage for nimble power and (gasp) UX proficency. And this not insignificant aside: As if the sheer incomprehensibility of Microsoft's dropping the ball on this powerful hegemony weren't astonishing enough, I'm almost as aghast at Plaxo's progressively going from smart, opportunistic, well-executed void filler in the mid-aughts as regards contacts, to completely irrelevant afterthought today. And Brewster et. al. have been terribly disappointing in picking it up. So i'm resigned to hunkering down around google but am finding it hard to give up on continuity and flexibilty across platforms. Exhausting to even write down!

• Answer:

  Neither Entourage, nor Outlook for Mac sync directly with Google calendar, however, both can sync with iCal, which CAN sync with Google calendar, and of course you can sync iPhone and Android with Google calendar. So the solution, if you can tolerate the pain that will likely ensure when it gets fowled up, which is usually inevitable, is to make your Google calendar the primary calendar, add that account to iCal so it syncs there and then go into the Entourage Preferences to enable SyncService for the Calendar, making sure that your "default" calendars are set properly in both iCal as well as Entourage, and then wait and watch it syncs, automagically. Seriously, though, you're asking for a world of pain because Microsoft's SyncServices and Apple's SyncServices don't always play nice together. It's one of those things that always SHOULD work, but often doesn't. And it will likely stop syncing at some point, giving you no indication that anything is wrong, other than the fact that you happen to notice there are appointments missing somewhere and then you'll have to isolate which device or application is failing to sync properly. So my advice, even though it's possible to do what you want, is to not do that. Use the web-based Google cal interface or use iCal/Calendar app or BusyCal (my personal preference) to sync with Google Cal and forget about trying to sync Entourage with anything other than an Exchange account, which is what it's really designed to do.