v-Card Problem

[Joe McGuire]

Is there a problem with OL 2003 or is it by design? When I send a v-Card
from OL2002 (on my office WinNT network) and import it into OL2003 (my home
computer) the additional information in that Contact unnamed field (the big
open space where you can enter any sort of text you want) gets stripped out.
Not that I use that field very much but when I do there is a pretty good
reason, at leat in my humble view. This problem does not come up when I
send v-cards the other direction, from OL 2003 to 2002 (the categories get
dropped but this screwup isn't nearly as annoying; maybe expecting Microsoft
products to work well with each other all the time is asking a bit much).

 

[Mike Schuh]

Joe, you are noticing the poor software design of Office Outlook CONTACTS in
its truest form. I can not tell you exactly where in the HELP folders I read
this but I believe it was under the CONTACTs heading, and then coping
contacts to outlook 2003. You will read that in their design wisdom, that
Microsoft added additional size features to the 2003 addition and did not
include a way to seamlessly transfer contacts to the 2003 version. They tell
you that the prior to 2003 pst files are not compatable with the new 2003
version. Nice of them to bury this information in the HELP files. In the
directions in HELP they tell you that there is no good way to import the
contacts file and then proceed to advise you to use the import function. When
you do this you have just messed up your contacts in many ways. I don't think
even the Outlook design team fully understands.
After reading through most of the posts at this site it is clear Outlook
2003 Contacts is less user friendly than it used to be.
Recommendation to all by some one who admittedly knows nothing is to deal
with this as a manual transfer and never corrupt your pre 2003 .pst file
containing the original data so you can reference it in the future.
Anyone importing or transfering data to the new 2003 will end up joining
this chat session at some point with a problem. It is curious that none of
the MVP responders have made any comments about this.

Mike

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

There have been some bugs related to contact bodies and vCard .vcf files, so make sure you're current on all service packs. If that doesn't fix it, create a message in rich-text format, make sure the recipient is marked to support RTF, and insert the contact as an attachment item.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers