To continue my saga about my transition from the Palm Treo, I have successfully mastered my Blackberry Curve. My Blackberry serves just about all of my needs, plus I now have a GPS and a few other cool tools. Being surrounded by Blackberry users, I had a lot of help. It was worth the learning curve and I am now getting ready to place my Treo for sale on eBay.
My attempted reconciliation with Microsoft Outlook, on the other hand, was short-lived. Our relationship is cordial, only for the fact that I need Outlook to manage the contacts that I converted from Palm Desktop. That scenario, however, will be temporary until I find another solution. I have to admit that I am spoiled. From the standpoint of simplicity and desktop-to-PDA synchronization, I have never seen an equal to the Palm Desktop. For email, I have used Netscape, Eudora and Thunderbird – no problem.
So I am slowly moving away once again from Microsoft Outlook. Since I lacked confidence in Outlook, I decided to synchronize with Google Calendar as a backup. What I discovered is that Google Calendar is pretty reliable, and can easily be accessed from any computer. It even sends my daily agenda to my Blackberry every morning. Google Calendar led me to give Gmail a try. I have had a Gmail account for quite a while, but I never considered it for an email client. I love Gmail’s “conversation” approach to email, and Gmail clears away my spam before sending it to my Blackberry. That is a productivity consultant’s dream!
Then there is Salesforce – my dream CRM solution. Remember from my last post that Salesforce was the catalyst for the conversion to the Blackberry/MS Outlook combo. Ironically, that solution is now subject to debate. After using it for a couple of months, I have discovered that although it is a very powerful solution, the very features that attracted me to Salesforce are not available in the Group Edition. Upgrading to the next level is overkill for a business my size, so my quest for an alternative CRM solution continues.
So what don’t I like about Outlook, you ask? Well, for one thing, it is slow and crashes two or three times a week. Then there is the duplication issue. In all the years I used a Palm, I never had duplicates. Two weeks into using Outlook, all of my tasks were suddenly duplicated. Well, I’m not really sure about that, because when I deleted one task, the duplicate -disappeared?
This may or may not be a related issue, but Outlook created a personal file (didn’t ask – just did it) to archive my e-mails. The personal file is an exact duplicate of everything in my “regular” folder, including my calendar. It seems one day I was posting to the wrong one, the “personal” folder instead of the regular “Outlook” folder. And when I synchronized with my Blackberry, …well, you know the rest. I guess there are worse things than missing an appointment – that is if you don’t call yourself a time management expert.
Outlook and I just don’t play well together, and it is probably because I don’t understand the rules. Most applications have a file structure that clearly distinguishes program files and data files. The rules are that you don’t touch the program files unless you really know what you’re doing. Data files are not an essential part of the application, and they are usually stored in a separate folder with other data files. Data files can generally be processed by program files, regardless of where they are located. It seems to me that address books and files containing your emails (eg. .pst and .ost files) should fall in the category of data files. Yet Microsoft, who invented the folder ”My Documents” as a location to store data files, hides Outlook data in some obscure location where it can’t be moved or easily backed up along with all of your other data files.
The good news is that my frustration with Outlook is moving me one step closer to the clouds -cloud computing, that is.