Activesync PIM Travails

[klozowski]

My Nokia 6265i bit the dust a week ago and I found a Telus-branded HTC Vogue on ebay. Windows mobile seemed like it might be an interesting adventure so I decided to give it a shot.

The first thing to do was to consolidate my contact list. I thought I'd do it in Windows Live because I could have my MSN list consolidated into my contacts, and because my data might be safest from loss online (heh...yeah right).

That was all well and good until I realized Windows Live contacts doesn't support contact photos. No problem, I'd just use outlook connector to open my Hotmail account in Outlook, copy my Windows Live contacts in Outlook to the outlook contacts list and add images there.

Here's where the trouble began. I synced my handset for the first time and whatever dedup functionality I would have expected to work to prevent the two copies of each name from ending up on my phone wasn't working.

A little futzing around indicated that Activesync is finnicky. I couldn't tell exaclty what it was but once my contact lists were more or less exactly the same in both Outlook and Windows Live the deduping worked fine. (although they can't be EXACTLY the same, it appears Outlooks IM field won't map to the MSN/Windows Live field in Live contacts, not to mention the image which is absent from Live contacts).

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the deduping didn't work perfectly. You'd expect the app to merge data from both lists, but no, despite having identical contact info on both sides, some of my contacts retained their photos, others did not. There seeemed to be no rhyme or reason to it.

There seemed to be a few obvious possibilities to fix this. The first one I considered was simply not to have ANY contacts in my Windows Live list. Unfortunately, this emptied out my Messenger contacts, so it wasn't viable. The second was to turn OFF contact syncing by default, and when I chose to sync my contacts, remove my hotmail account from outlook, sync, and re-add.

You'd think removing contact syncing from Activesync would simply leave your handset's contact list alone. WRONG! It 'syncs' your handset's contact list to an empty list, leaving the ocntact list empty.

I feel like I'm on crack, but I would really like to do what seems to be a simple task: Maintain two contact lists -- one in Windows Live, one in Outlook (to retain contact images). When syncing to my phone, I simply want to get one contact list with no duplicates and with all images present.

Is there a way, or am I just going to join the throng of Microsoft-bashers and fantasize about the day my contract with Telus is up and I can buy an iPhone?

[klozowski]

Got this fixed thanks to Mustan-Tech's latest kitchen, which allowed me to disable Windows Live contact syncing. Don't know why Telus had this disabled. Jokers.

THANK YOU MUSTAN-TECH!