To all my friends and anyone else who happens upon this blog
posting, I have decided to document what I believe is the solution to the
ongoing struggles I have experienced in the last 18 months trying to get
Android to function in a consistent and reliable manner alongside my
Outlook-led life. I believe I have tamed
the beast. To all my Apple buddies, I am
not sure Apple has a better approach to my situation according to many to whom
I have consulted so save your breath.
iPhone is not in my future.
Here’s the situation and the final answer.
I run Outlook as a stand-alone e-mail application. I connect to 5 different mail servers, one of
which is an Exchange server. I do not
use the Exchange as a primary mail server but as just another POP3 account.
The challenge is calendar and contact list
synchronization. E-mail from all 5
systems works great….other than native Android does not have any method for bulk
deleting messages from the phone. Yes,
it does seem odd but Google is relying on the handset vendors to provide a true
message delete function. At least this
is true for Gingerbread.
Anyway, calendar and contact sync’ing are a problem.
Google wants everyone to sync to a Gmail account. 2 things wrong with that: I don’t trust Google with the info and there
is no elegant way to keep my Outlook info in sync with Google. Android to Google sync is fine if you are
willing to accept the field layout that Google enforces. These layouts do not map well to Outlook thus
a choice is forced on the user; accept the Outlook layout for calendar and contact
info or accept the Google layout. Google
used to have an Outlook client to Gmail sync app but has discontinued the
support of that app unless you are a paying Google apps user. I did try the tool prior to it being
discontinued and there were lots of issues with both contacts and calendar
items so no real loss IMHO. As I am reliant
on Outlook, making Gmail the primary system is not possible or viable.
I also discovered that every Outlook Sync app that I could grab
from the Google Play site, paid and free, had issues with Outlook 2010. I suspect there was something in the MS
upgrade from O2007 to O2010 that wasn’t kosher but the result is that I am not
able to find a single synchronization app that works with a standalone Outlook
2010 install. I suspect had I the option
to start over with a brand new .PST file, things would have been
different. Not that I mind too much but
I find it interesting that MS has modified the storage format and/or APIs to
the .PST file to such a degree that what works with O2007 does not stand a
chance with O2010.
So here’s where I have ended up. My Nexus S Android phone on Gingerbread is
sync’ing with Outlook 2007 via MyPhoneExplorer (MPE). I did send off money to the developer as a token
of my appreciation. MPE is configured to
only sync from Outlook to the phone. No
2-way sync. No worries about some app
enabling a sync to GMail and messing up my phone which then messes up my Outlook. Yes, this has happened more than once.
The nice part about MPE is that although the push is 1
direction, I still get a pop-up that displays any differences between the phone
and Outlook so that I can allow individual phone updates to be pushed into
Outlook. Painful? Sometimes, but always better than scrambling
the calendar or address book in Outlook.
Trust a bi-directional sync? No
way. I have wasted way too many hours
rebuilding Outlook to risk an issue. I
gladly screen the individual changes.
The bottom line is that I do like to tinker with computer
gear and my Android phone allows me to do a lot of that. If my tinkering helps 1 other Android user
avoid the late night rebuild efforts I have undertaken, then that’s a good
thing.
The next step is to get a Key Lime Pie-based phone when they
ship and do it all over again.
