Outlook 2007 Contact Sync Question

DLCPhoto · #1 (**permalink**) 09-24-2009, 07:24 PM

OK, I've had my VZW TP2 3 days now, and I'm starting to get comfortable with it. I've come from the Palm world (515, then TX), and will be switching to Outlook to facilitate sycing contacts, email, calendar, etc.

The Outlook 2007 I ordered just came in, and I'll be installing and setting this up shortly. I believe I can reconfigure my Palm Desktop to sync via Outlook, which should help get those Contacts and Calendar into Outlook, and from there to my TP2. If not, I can probably export/import some way or the other.

My first question concerns the contact list I have in Windows Mail (my desktop is Vista 64-bit Home Premium). In addition to my regular contact categories, I have a mailing list of about 600+ individuals for my photography website, which I use when I need to send an update email to those who have requested this. In Windows Mail, I have separate folders for each category of contacts, one of which is the photography email list, which I hope will facilitate getting these into Outlook 2007.

This sets up my first question: I'm hoping I can configure Outlook 2007 to have the same categories of contacts that I have in Windows Mail, and import those directly from my Windows Mail contact list. Is this possible, and if so how?

Next, I do not want, or need, to have those 600+ individuals in that Photography Category on my TP2 Contact List. My second question is whether or not I can configure the Contact Sync to include or exclude different categories of my contact list.

(And I guess I'll need to install Windows Mobile Device Center for 64-bit Vista to implement the synching process.)

Thanks in advance!

Cork · #2 (**permalink**) 09-24-2009, 10:27 PM

DLC, I can only contribute based on the little I know. Here are some thoughts, but take this with a grain of salt. With luck, someone with more knowledge will see this.

1. My experience with Outlook is that it will do an excellent job of picking up info from other MS mail programs. I've converted from Vista's Mail but not to Outlook, but I'd be shocked if Outlook could not capture Categories from Mail when it captured them from my Palm Desktop. This part should work fine.
2. As for syncing with the Windows Mobile device, I suspect your options will be to sync Contacts or not. Here I could be wrong, but I do not believe you can sync a portion of your Contacts. Suggest you check on a MS Outlook-specific forum in the Office or Windows communities.

Good Luck!

Cork · #3 (**permalink**) 09-24-2009, 10:32 PM

By the way, what's your Photo site? I'm an amateur enthusiast . . .

DLCPhoto · #4 (**permalink**) 09-25-2009, 06:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cork

DLC, I can only contribute based on the little I know. Here are some thoughts, but take this with a grain of salt. With luck, someone with more knowledge will see this.

1. My experience with Outlook is that it will do an excellent job of picking up info from other MS mail programs. I've converted from Vista's Mail but not to Outlook, but I'd be shocked if Outlook could not capture Categories from Mail when it captured them from my Palm Desktop. This part should work fine.
2. As for syncing with the Windows Mobile device, I suspect your options will be to sync Contacts or not. Here I could be wrong, but I do not believe you can sync a portion of your Contacts. Suggest you check on a MS Outlook-specific forum in the Office or Windows communities.

Good Luck!

Thanks for the post and bump. I suspect you're right about Outlook being able to handle and capture Categories. I imagine I'll be able to figure it out when I install it, but wanting to save some time and aggravation thought I'd check if anybody knew about it from experience. Good suggestion about checking on the Outlook boards.

And I'm worried that Contact Sync with a WM device could be an all or nothing, with no ability to select which Categories of contacts I want included. I guess it wouldn't be the end of the world to have those 600+ contacts on my TP2; just some wasted storage space. Anybody know for sure about this?

And regarding my photography - I had edited my signature yesterday to show some links, and thought it would have shown up in any prior posts. It does with the new ones, so the links to my site and workshops are below - thanks for asking!

Cork · #5 (**permalink**) 09-25-2009, 03:31 PM

Great site! All my wildlife photos are of my kids these days. Oh, well.

BTW, I played with the sync settings to see if there was a way to segregate a category from the sync and did not find one. It does indeed look like all or nothing.

ejennis · #6 (**permalink**) 09-25-2009, 05:43 PM

Outlook will sync all of the contacts in the primary "contacts" folder. Once you get Outlook setup on your computer, you will see that in the "personal folders" tree, there is a folder named "contacts". It is the contents of that folder, that gets synced.

You have two options to "control" syncing to the device.
1) You can put any contacts you do not want to sync with the device into a subfolder in the "contacts" main folder. These will not sync to the phone. You could create a "photography" subfolder and place all of those contacts in there.
2) You can manage the contacts with their assigned categories. You can pick which categories to view on the phone. An inelegant solution at best.

There was a third party sync conduit that enabled more options with the sync, but it has been removed from the companies website.

DLCPhoto · #7 (**permalink**) 09-25-2009, 07:21 PM

Thanks, guys. I think you're both right on the money.

I had a look at the Windows Mobile Device Center site, and it appears there that it's an all or nothing, as you suggest.

Option #1 in ejennis's post should be workable.

The other option I have is to just not import the Photography contacts into Outlook, and just use Windows Mail when I need to send out a mass email to those contacts (assuming that Windows Mail and Outlook uses separate file systems to track their contacts).

So one way or the other, I should be able to make it work.

Thanks for the input and suggestions.

DLCPhoto · #8 (**permalink**) 09-25-2009, 07:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cork

Great site! All my wildlife photos are of my kids these days. Oh, well.

Thanks

I went for many years doing the exact same thing. Only when the kids were grown and mostly on their own did I have enough time to shift towards nature and wildlife photography. Your day will come!

DLCPhoto · #9 (**permalink**) 09-30-2009, 01:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ejennis

Outlook will sync all of the contacts in the primary "contacts" folder. Once you get Outlook setup on your computer, you will see that in the "personal folders" tree, there is a folder named "contacts". It is the contents of that folder, that gets synced.

You have two options to "control" syncing to the device.
1) You can put any contacts you do not want to sync with the device into a subfolder in the "contacts" main folder. These will not sync to the phone. You could create a "photography" subfolder and place all of those contacts in there.

Ok, making progress. Installed Outlook 2007 to my desktop, synched my Palm TX to it, got all of those contacts and calendar in without problem. I then imported my Windows Mail Contacs and Mail Messages. I have all but the photography list ones in the main Contact Folder, and assigned a variety of categories.

I have the photography list contacts in a separate subfolder, so I'm about to synch with my TP2. According to what you said, it will only synch the main Contact folder contacts, and will ignore those in the subfolder.

My question is whether or not the Properties of this Subfolder needs to be adjusted. There is an entry called "Show this folder as an email Address Book." This is checked for both Contacts and the Subfolder.

So, will it ignore the subfolder, regardless of that setting, or does that setting need to be unchecked? I'd prefer to get this right on the first synch, and not have to delete those 622 contacts and start over again.

Thanks!

P.S. I don't think it should matter, but I created a new folder to replace "Personal Folder," moved everything there, and deleted the original. I did this because I wanted all of these files to be on my Data partition, and not on my OS partition. Everything seems to be working correctly.

Does Outlook store its Contact/Address Book data in the same .pst file, or is it stored elsewhere in a separate file?

DLCPhoto · #10 (**permalink**) 10-02-2009, 05:58 AM

Well, just to finish off this thread, for anybody who might have similar needs and questions, I went ahead and completed the Outlook transition and sync:

I can verify that only Contacts in the main folder, and none in any of the subfolders get synced, at least using Windows Mobile Device Center, 64-bit, Vista Home Premium. I suspect this is across the board with 32-bit, as well as XP/Active sync.

I left the default setting ("Show this folder as an email Address Book") selected, and it worked just fine. I still don't know exactly what deselecting this would do, but I didn't need to mess with it for the sake of what I was needing to do here.

When synced, it maintains the Category assignments I made in Outlook, so I can filter my Contact List on the phone, which comes in handy.

Finally, the primary .pst file does contain all the Contacts and sub-folders, Calendar, etc. I installed Outlook 2007 to my Laptop, created the same .pst folder name, and then just copied the .pst file from my desktop to the laptop, and everything was there. To keep these synced, I'll just need to periodically copy that file over. Works just like I need it to.

Hope this might be of help to someone.