Solve360 Discussion Forums

Outlook Sync is still important

Nov 23, 2009 08:03am bdesilva Lyncean 261 posts	Outlook is the center of my world much to the chagrin of some (and sometimes me). It has become a great HUB of information related to contacts. I used to hate it, but now it saves me a TON of TIME. Why? 1) So many web apps (LinkedIn & Plaxo, Google, Microsoft Live & Yahoo, Siebel, etc) and desktop tools (Quickbooks, MS Project, Mindjet, etc.) sync and link to Outlook. Anytime a contact updates his profile in LinkedIn or picture in Plaxo (along of course with anything else), calendar in Google or task changes in MS Project, or accounting adds data in Quickbooks, they show up in Outlook and thus in my iPhone/Blackberry/WMP. Note* you wouldn’t have to support all the mobile devices out there if you sync to Outlook. They all sync to Outlook for you. HUB 2) Anything I add to my mobile device such as calendar updates, contact changes/additions, NOTES, pictures of contacts, voice memos, etc it shows up in Outlook, and thus everywhere else. 3) Outlook has great SPAM tools available, powerful rules for handling incoming and outgoing mail. Excellent meeting scheduling ability. I can drag an email to create a contact, task, meeting, calendar item, etc. FAST. It reminds me about stuff to do and does it on my iPhone too. 4) Search. With 2007 we have powerful search capabilities native in OL and with the addition of the addin Xobni, wow. 5) Dashboard: My email w/preview and contact history (xobni), tasks, personal & business & kids calendar, linkedin info, RSS are all in one place in one view. I like that for most of the stuff that comes to me. 360 can’t and shouldn’t try to be all that. Some folk can’t leave Outlook because it’s mandated by the organization or more commonly (I fit in this one), people on my team have corporate email accounts for scheduling meetings and such on their exchange servers. I need Outlook to be able to grab that email, link to their exchange folder structure, calendars, etc. In addition there is a HUGE support and cottage industry surrounding it making valuable addins that save me time. I know there are alternatives and some workarounds, most of them a bit weak. I use some of them already. Syncing to Google contacts works well be won’t help as the Contacts part of Google is just so weak. Outlook is a great HUB. That’s its primary value in my opinion. Please do what I hope is still in your plans and give us a powerful sync. What do I mean by that? Firstly a manual contact and calendar sync. MUCH better, a toolbar in Outlook (or a system try item like the Google Calendar Sync or Premium Business edition) like the other more successful syncs handle it. Some details (ignoring the simplicity model of 360 which I’m NOT really asking you to do. Just want to dump my thoughts <G>): 1. Automatic and manual sync, choose the interval and detail. 2. Use the Outlook sync compare dialog it uses for imports that let you see the fields about to be changed. 3. We should be able to choose which contacts to sync and how much information (including contact blog which should go uni-directional to a linked OneNote if avail, if not, just in the notes.) I might want all the 360 contacts sync’d both ways or ALL contacts or some selection from Outlook chosen by a category or company. Further thoughts: a. Merge Prompt: This will ask you which contact to overwrite if both have been updated. Better with field by field OK, but I’d be very happy just overwriting one way or the other. b. Merge Outlook Wins: If both contacts have been updated, the 360 contact will be overwritten. c. Merge 360 Wins: If both contacts have been updated, the Outlook contact will be overwritten. d. Outlook To 360 Only: Only updates 360 contacts based on Outlook contacts. e. 360 To Outlook Only: Only updates Outlook contacts based on 360 contacts. 4. Sync calendar data in the same manner; Having a google calendar driven by 360 isn’t nearly as useful as I cannot make changes without logging into 360 on my desktop. I want to do this from my phone and in the main (Outlook) calendar. 5. Projects should sync to Tasks with the blog in the note so we can see everything. 360 could create a folder for each project blog with tasks and put the tasks in task items. Just my 2cents.

Nov 25, 2009 08:52am Stefan Sentinel 35 posts	Well described. Thanks. We put 2 cents as well.

Dec 08, 2009 05:55pm FabDigs.com New Member 1 post	Hear, hear! I’ll put my $1 in.

Dec 13, 2009 05:49am adrian@vm Lyncean 352 posts	I agree that many business still use Outlook. I would say that outlook sync causes a lot of problems for development because of licensing and support. I say this having worked in Sugar and the nightmare it is to get the SugarOutlook plugin to work properly. It is a going to be a lot of work and time to get Outlook going good with Solve, which means a lot of other development would be put on the back burner, something I’m not interested in personally - though I do feel for those of you stuck in Outlook. A lot of what you’ve mentioned can be updates done to Solve itself which could solve (eek) some of the issues. Not saying Outlook sync wouldn’t be fantastic and open the product up to more companies, but that I think it’s a difficult path for such an innovative product to take - stepping backwards to help a very outdated and buggy program with a totally different deployment philosophy.

Dec 13, 2009 07:10am bdesilva Lyncean 261 posts	Actually, I’m not stuck in OL at all. It’s my choice because it does everything I want in the easiest manner possible and everything I use does link nicely to it. If Solve or anything else could do what it does for me I’d switch.

Dec 13, 2009 07:19am adrian@vm Lyncean 352 posts	bdesilva - Dec 13, 2009 07:10am Actually, I’m not stuck in OL at all. It’s my choice because it does everything I want in the easiest manner possible and everything I use does link nicely to it. If Solve or anything else could do what it does for me I’d switch. Outlook definitely is a nice package for each end user - but on the server side, the maintenance, syncing contacts / calendars / data (documents etc.)? For me the main problems with outlook come down to sharing - tasks, data, etc. I’m sympathetic to Outlook end users, but I also believe that the way forward is with changes that fundamentally make Solve the go-to app, not Outlook. This makes sense for the developers at Norada to make their product better, not Microsoft’s. But at least in use cases I’ve worked with so far, people are happy to trade some of the fine tuning of Outlook for the benefits of Solve360 and google Apps (though the latter is my own endorsing). I do believe that Solve has a ways to go to replace outlook for a lot of companies, and many of them will never buy into the cloud idea, but I think they will be less competitive. The fact that you don’t have to remote-wipe an Outlook account, and can just deny an end-user access has been a big selling point for larger firms / companies alone.

Dec 14, 2009 06:27am dave@vm Lyncean 727 posts	@ bdesilva: there is a new contact sharing app in Beta right now. http://www.syncacross.om maybe this might help you manage all your contacts. I haven’t tried it yet, I’m still waiting for them to send the next round of Beta invites out

Dec 14, 2009 10:42am bdesilva Lyncean 261 posts	I’ve seen several of those, have tried a few, and will prob start using one at some point as I don’t see any other choice. There is however quite a bit lost syncing though multiple apps since googles contact management is so weak… Bryan

Jan 10, 2010 04:02pm shums Aficionado 16 posts	The best solution i have found so far has been switching to google apps premier two weeks ago, which has full support for outlook sync! (mail, calendar and contacts) As S360, connects nicely with google apps for contact sync as well as the functionality for google apps in S360 webmail, it could keep me fully synced from outlook to google apps to S360, to outlook, working seamlessly. And as I have an Android phone, I’m synced to Google Apps and to S360 with the mobile interface designed for the iphone that still works for Android it seems. Now all I need is an Android specific application by S360 and we are all set. Any chance S360 is working on an Off-line Mode?

Jan 10, 2010 04:07pm shums Aficionado 16 posts	I should agree though, having a google calendar driven by 360 is’t fantastic. Would be good to have true calendar sync as well as task sync…. although the latter might not yet be possible with google apps as they are not yet ready either.