Posts Tagged: "Outlook"

Blackberry Desktop Manager Incompatibility with Outlook 2010

The consulting community seems excited about Office 2010. There are lots of great features and some significant improvements. I’m writing today about a particular configuration issue that will only be applicable to people in Exchange environments that access another user’s folders.

In prior versions of Outlook, in order to see another user’s contacts in your “windows address book” you had to follow a convoluted 10 step process that was a nightmare to implement in any reasonable amount of time. Now we can simply add a second exchange account and see the additional address book. This is a big time saver.

With BES services, we can wirelessly sync your Blackberry to your Outlook folders. However sometimes we need to sync the Blackberry to a different folder, perhaps your boss’ contacts folder. Now we have to install Blackberry Desktop Manager and disable wireless sync on your contacts. Then we can specify an additional folder to sync.

Throughout the different versions of Outlook, there have been lots of issues with compatibility with Blackberry Desktop Manager, most notably in the scenario above, we cannot use cached exchange mode. But now with the release of Outlook 2010, the desktop manager won’t connect at all. There are various workarounds, none of which are realistic for consultants or clients for that matter.

I believe that this failure of RIM to stay in compatibility with what I consider their main partner is just another reason they’ll continue to lose users and market share. If I as a consultant, cannot do what my clients need and expect, then I won’t use or recommend the product anymore. The most frustrating part of this is that in many stores, I can no longer purchase Office 2007.

Recovering from an Outlook “uh oh”

Today a client called me in a panic. She had inadvertently removed the category from several hundred contacts. Of course this couldn’t have happened at a more inopportune moment – she was preparing an important mailing about a very important event!

She asked if her Crashplan backup would save her. Unfortunately, the answer was no. Crashplan and other services only backup data such as Microsoft Word documents and photos. Categories in Outlook are a funny thing, there is no easy way to back them up. Next she wondered if her hosted exchange provider could restore her Outlook. Sadly, again the answer was no. Most hosted exchange providers do not provide brick level, individual mailbox restores. They really should offer it, IMHO (even as an optional upgrade, if not a standard feature).

I sat with this for a minute and an idea came to me. What if I could sort the contacts by category, then use the Field Chooser to find a “recently modified” field and then add it to the Outlook column bar? I discovered the “modified” field in the “All Appointments” drop down. Now she could sort by that field, and quickly identify the 130 some odd contacts for whom she had removed the category! It didn’t take long for her to add back the missing information so she could take care of the important mailing.

Going the extra mile and getting creative when many consultants would have said tough luck really made all the difference in the world for this client.