Planet Midgard: Archive
2006-01-31 - 2006-02-27
Synchronizing is a bitch
Posted on 2006-02-20 19:25:50 GMT.
I did this a week ago, but have had so many other things on my mind, that some things may have been left out...I'll update them when I remember.
Programs
The environments and programs are the following:- Outlook 2003 (work mail)
- Thunderbird (other mail)
- floAt's Mobile Agent (mobile stuff on PC)
- Sony Ericsson s700i
- IVT BlueSoleil
Step one - one good address book
The first thing to do was to make one address book look good. This includes splitting all names to their right slots (firstname and surname to different places and so on) and setting all numbers to start with +358 (if they were finnish numbers). The best place to do this for me was on Thunderbird, because AFAIK it supports standards and it can import stuff from Outlook. This part went great, so no problems there but it is quite time consuming. I would like to see some kind of "merge similar cards" function, but I could not find anything like that, so it was manual work...Couple of hours later [cut-copy-paste-swear], the address book looks fine and I may finally start my synchronization. Sweet. So the next step was to take a backup. Smart.
Step 2 - synchronization of Outlook and Thunderbird
For this thing we first have to export the Thunderbird address book, and we have 3 different formats to do this: ldif, csv and tab-delimitered text files. Well... Ldif is of-course not supported with Outlook, but the other 2 formats should be....but no. The only way to get the Outlook address book importer to work was with the tab-delimitred form.Well here is the first problem...Outlooks cards are slightly different from the Thunderbirds. This means that a part of my work in step one was in vain. Great. Well if the sync from Thunderbird to Outlook is this hard, then perhaps it would work the other way. So here I go again, and some time later I have the Outlook address book in good shape. I (of course) Googled around for tools for converting ldif to a Outlook accepted form, but the results that I found are not free..at least not for Windows.
Everything looks ok, but this is no syncronization...or it is, but one-way, and things have not exactly gone smoothly...
Step 3 - syncronization with my mobile phone
Well now the fun starts... The FMA works great, and seeing all my phone info on my computer screen and be able to use the phone from here is kind of cool. Well everything looks good, but just to be sure, I took a backup of Outlooks adress book and FMA has tools to backup my phone, so I used it too. This turned out to be a smart move...partially.My Outlook address book now contains all the numbers and email adresses, and I go all info backed up, so I now empty the phones adress book with FMA. Some were deleted, but some not, so I delete them manually from my phone. Now we have a empty phone and a nice Outlook adress book an a button that says " Sync with outlook". Now it all starts to go to hell...
Most things are synced nicely, but then some are duplicated!?!? I try to delete those, and sync again, but now I have some duplicates and some names three times. After struggling for some time, and deleting all and syncing again. After doing this for some time, I just quit...I was that pissed off.
Step 4 - recover everything from the backups
I was smart, and had backups of everything. This saved my Outlook adress book, and as I said syncing that with Thunderbird is easy. Keeping things in sync between mailprograms is not easy...it seems to be impossible. When adding a mobile phone into the mess..."¤#"#"¤%#¤%#¤%!Soo...now I'm stuck with a empty cellphone, but I took a backup with FMA. Briliant. Just import it into...FUCK. Importing does not work...probably because the exporting just exported the first vCard from the phones adressbook. frustrating.