Synchronising Google Calendar with Thunderbird Calendar

For some time now I have been running exclusively in Ubuntu on my corporate LAN with very few problems. Initially I used Evolution as my mail client as it could directly link up to MS-Exchange server so I got all my mail, global address book and calendar. But when my company updated to MS-Exchange server 2007 Evolution was no longer able to do this so I went over to Thunderbird. This was fine as far as mail and contacts were concerned but I could not get the Lightening calendar addon to synchronise with Outlook. I tried the method suggested by Ryan Hadley but I just couldn’t get it, so I gave up on Outlook altogether and just used Thunderbird/Lightening. Then I read over at Lifehacker about synchronising any desktop calendar with Google Calendar. I followed the very clear instructions and in seconds I had my desktop calendar sychronising with my Google Calendar. This was great as I could now access all my events etc. from any PC, but it got me thinking of synchronising with Outlook again so I had another crack at it, but with no luck. It then it dawned on me after looking at the image above from the Lifehacker article If I synchronised Thunderbird with Google and Outlook with Google then in effect all three would be the synchronised, obvious really.