B
Bill Thompson
Another of the options for syncing MS-Outlook between desktop and
laptop mentioned on http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/sync.htm is a
program called OsaSync-PRO (http://www.vaita.com/OsaSyncPro.asp). I
spent a few hours trying out the trial version. Here's what I
found.
It looks excellent: real sync'ing of every message as well as
calendar, notes, contacts, and tasks; peer-to-peer networking so
each machine just finds the other machine; and full integration into
Outlook including a menu item with configuration parameters.
However, on my computers, I had these problems:
Moving a message from one folder to another on the desktop (the
machine where I ran the connection wizard) causes an exception.
(This problem seems to have disappeared by itself, though.)
All filtering rules fail. So all incoming messages show up in
your inbox instead of being moved to folders automatically.
The program does not detect duplicates. So, if you have Outlook
set to leave stuff on your mail server for a while, and both your
desktop and laptop download the same messages, you'll get lots of
duplicate messages. This essentially defeats my purpose in
having email sync'ing, since I end up having to manually file
incoming messages on both machines (the ones that aren't caught
by filtering rules, of course).
Attempting to sync the Notes folder caused an exception.
After a sync, on the machine that didn't originally retrieve the
message from the mail server, all the copied messages are marked
read, even if you haven't read them on either machine.
If you take the laptop away and bring it back to the network, it
stops sync'ing. The instructions say you have to restart Outlook
to get it to start sync'ing again. A minor nuisance, but still a
nuisance.
It looks like it would be an excellent program with a few changes.
For now, though, it looks like it won't let you run Outlook on
desktop and laptop as if they were operating on a single file.
There are quite a few more programs listed on
http://www.vaita.com/OsaSyncPro.asp. I imagine that for most of
them, it will take as much time and effort to tell if they work as
it did for this one. Has anyone gotten sync'ing between desktop and
laptop to work? If so, I hope you'll tell us how you did it! It
would save me and maybe a lot of other people a lot of time.
Bill Thompson
laptop mentioned on http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/sync.htm is a
program called OsaSync-PRO (http://www.vaita.com/OsaSyncPro.asp). I
spent a few hours trying out the trial version. Here's what I
found.
It looks excellent: real sync'ing of every message as well as
calendar, notes, contacts, and tasks; peer-to-peer networking so
each machine just finds the other machine; and full integration into
Outlook including a menu item with configuration parameters.
However, on my computers, I had these problems:
Moving a message from one folder to another on the desktop (the
machine where I ran the connection wizard) causes an exception.
(This problem seems to have disappeared by itself, though.)
All filtering rules fail. So all incoming messages show up in
your inbox instead of being moved to folders automatically.
The program does not detect duplicates. So, if you have Outlook
set to leave stuff on your mail server for a while, and both your
desktop and laptop download the same messages, you'll get lots of
duplicate messages. This essentially defeats my purpose in
having email sync'ing, since I end up having to manually file
incoming messages on both machines (the ones that aren't caught
by filtering rules, of course).
Attempting to sync the Notes folder caused an exception.
After a sync, on the machine that didn't originally retrieve the
message from the mail server, all the copied messages are marked
read, even if you haven't read them on either machine.
If you take the laptop away and bring it back to the network, it
stops sync'ing. The instructions say you have to restart Outlook
to get it to start sync'ing again. A minor nuisance, but still a
nuisance.
It looks like it would be an excellent program with a few changes.
For now, though, it looks like it won't let you run Outlook on
desktop and laptop as if they were operating on a single file.
There are quite a few more programs listed on
http://www.vaita.com/OsaSyncPro.asp. I imagine that for most of
them, it will take as much time and effort to tell if they work as
it did for this one. Has anyone gotten sync'ing between desktop and
laptop to work? If so, I hope you'll tell us how you did it! It
would save me and maybe a lot of other people a lot of time.
Bill Thompson