How To: Synchronise Contacts & Appointments between a Work Windows/Exchange/Blackberry world and a Home Mac/Mobile Me/iPhone world

Here’s my setup. If yours is similar, then this post may help you.

Work

Home

The Goal

At work I have a decade+ of contacts, and years of calendar appointments, in Outlook, and I want to:

The Ideal Solution

One sync service to bind them all…

However, one small sticking point: no such thing exists, as far as I can see.*
*(feel free to point me at the One True Sync in the comments, I’m happy to be wrong on this and happy to pay money for The Ideal Solution).

The Alternative Solution

The previous statement about the Ideal Solution isn’t necessarily completely correct – it should probably read “without full control over all the key parts of your electronic world, no such thing exists, as far as I can see”.

If you have control of the entire system, then you probably have the ability to specify system components that work with each other and a single sync solution out of the box (or with minimal configuration).

In either case, you have a working synchronisation system – any reasonably objective observer should probably agree that, whether they prefer Windows PCs or they prefer the Mac, it’s entirely possible to have a working system that syncs Contact and Calendar data pretty well if you keep everything relatively homogenous.

Stepping back slightly from the black or white approach, you may decide that your Windows world can accommodate the odd iPhone or two, by upgrading and configuring your Exchange Server (2007 as a minimum, I think) appropriately to allow a mixed environment. I hear that this works pretty well. Hooking up your iPhone to the Exchange Server gives an iPhone user pretty much the same experience that Blackberry users get – instantish propagation of any updates you make to your Contacts or Calendar. Nice. You may have worked out that when it comes to getting the job done, seven times out of ten I am tool-agnostic… hence the benchmark for sync being the Blackberry experience. It works.

Out here in the world that I inhabit, my organisation controls their infrastructure with an iron fist, and has categorically stated that the iPhone will not be supported. Sound like you?
Oh, and if you’re in roughly the same boat as I am, then you’ll have noticed that using the available Apple tools, you can sync with Exchange, or you can can sync with Mobile Me, but you can’t sync with BOTH.

Damn and blast!

Never fear, for a solution is at hand…

The Half-Arsed Solution

Finally, you’ve waded through all this introductory prose, and here’s the meat. I make no claim to this being a unique solution to the problem outlined above, however I did quite a bit of searching and couldn’t find much that looks like a decent explanation or a How To. Perhaps it’s so obvious that any self respecting nerd finds it below him/her to actually spell it out. Perhaps my solution is a crime against nature, like boy bands or emo haircuts. Nevertheless…

To put it simply:

Ooh, but I hear Plaxo was bought by Comcast, and aren’t they meant to be a tad evil? Well, possibly, but trafficking with Comcast might well be worth it to not have to manually synchronise your information. Your decision.

In a little more detail:

On Plaxo.com

  1. Signup for the Plaxo service.
    1. You’re looking for www.plaxo.com, in case that wasn’t obvious.
    2. There’s a bunch of extra features to Plaxo that may or may not be of any value to you; I don’t use any of them, I have enough social networking tools at my disposal, the last thing I need is yet another. Use ‘em or ignore them, it’s irrelevant to the synchronisation functionality.
    3. Feel free to give Plaxo as little or as much profile information about you as you like – I gave ‘em very little, although…
    4. Remember, you’re entrusting a copy of all of your contacts and all of your appointments to these guys, so read the T’s & C’s carefully… If you’re uncomfortable, proceed no further.
  2. Set up Plaxo in general.
    1. Plaxo works on the basis of a single central source of data on the Plaxo servers, with a number of ‘Sync Points’ (eg. the Plaxo Outlook plugin on my work PC, or the Plaxo preference pane on my Mac Mini) that are able to push information each way.

On the Work / PC side of things

  1. You don’t need to touch any of the following:
    1. MS Exchange.
    2. RIM BES.
    3. The Blackberry.
  2. You do need to install software and configure it on:
    1. Your Windows PC.
  3. Back up your PC.
  4. Back up all of your Outlook contacts, appointments and anything else you value. I suggest archiving each type of data to a separate .pst file, in case the sync process corrupts everything, or you want to ditch this idea as too hard roll back to a happier, simpler time.
  5. No, really, at least back up the Outlook bits. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
  6. Ensure you have the ability to install the Plaxo plugin on the Windows / Outlook side of the house.
    • You may need to be a local administrator for your machine to allow this sort of thing.
    • If you’re not able to do it yourself, perhaps it’s time to be nice to your local sysadmin, IT helpdesk or anyone else with this level of control, and get them to do it for you. Good luck with that.
  7. Download & Install the Plaxo software on your Windows PC.
    • If you need instructions on downloading, this How To is too advanced for you. Stop now.
    • Install the software on your PC. Follow Plaxo’s bouncing ball. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but it’s not difficult.

More to come…

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