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HOWTO: Syncing Contacts and Calendar info between Nokia smartphone and Outlook

rahulgaitonde — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:29:35 +0000

Update: this HOWTO remains up to date even as of 2011. You need: the

Nokia PC Suite and Microsoft Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010 running on Windows XP or Windows Vista or Windows 7. And a Nokia S60 (Series 60) phone – which could also be an Eseries or Nseries one.

I have NOT tried this on Nokia’s Ovi Suite and on Nokia S40 (Series 40) phones.

Your contact list and calendar events on your mobile phone have nothing to do with the contacts and calendar items on your Outlook, even though most of them are the same. For instance, you store contact numbers in your phone and email info in Outlook’s contacts. Shouldn’t they both be connected? Shouldn’t the reminders/events you set on your phone, or the meetings you enter in your Outlook calendar be available at your desk and while you’re on the go?

This HowTo will teach you to keep your Contacts, Calendar events and Notes in sync between Microsoft Outlook and your Nokia smartphone. I have tested this with Outlook 2003 and 2007, and it should work with all Nseries and Eseries phones plus several phones that run S60. If your phone came with a Nokia PC Suite installation CD, it’ll work.

Setting things up for the first time

Install Nokia PC Suite on your computer. Using either Bluetooth or the USB-based cable, connect your phone to your computer, and start up PC Suite. Launch the Nokia PC Sync application. This is roughly how things should look (things may differ slightly depending on your PC Suite version):

When you first start up, this is what you'll see.

Click the Setup icon, bottom center. Select Microsoft Outlook as your email application (this HowTo should also be applicable if you have been condemned to use Lotus Notes at work):

Setup is the icon that looks like a wrench.

Next, choose what you want synchronized, and how far back and forward you want calendar events synced. If you’ve chosen to synchronize bookmarks too, choose your preferred browser. The list below should be enough for most people:

Bookmarks syncs F'fox/IE with Nokia's default browser

A year back and forth should be more than enough.

No Opera/Safari support, unfortunately.

Synchronizing

Once you’re done with the Setup Wizard, click the “Synchronize Now” button:

Next time, you can just double-click the system-tray icon to sync.

It’ll take a while the first time, depending on how many contacts and calendar events you’ve stored in both Outlook and your smartphone:

Be patient the first time...

... it'll take mere seconds for later syncs.

That’s all you need to do. Once the synchronization’s done, a short summary will be displayed on the home screen:

Over 800 contacts and entries.

Conclusion

Take a look at your Outlook calendar and contacts – it’ll be filled with birthday entries and sundry tasks/TODOs, while your phone’s calendar will be filled with your meetings/appointments and your contacts will have their email addresses entered along with their phone numbers.

Calendar Entries...

... and contacts.

Notes

1. You might have to weed out significant amounts of duplicate entries if you stored the same contact under slightly different names in your phone and Outlook

2. Reminders are transferred both ways, so you can create an alarm or a reminder on Outlook and have it ring on your phone (and vice versa).

3. If you’re using Bluetooth, you can also set your phone and Outlook to sync automatically periodically.

Gmail and managing clutter

rahulgaitonde — Sat, 06 May 2006 11:03:00 +0000

It’s official – Gmail’s conversation view is the best way to manage lots of email. Evidence? Well, the internal mailing list that IIM Kozhikode students set up has seen well over a thousand messages in the past three weeks. Almost all those who chose to receive this deluge of email in their Yahoo! webmail inboxes have been unable to deal with the traffic, and have either simply lost track of content and have given up reading it, or have been unable to locate the information they need. On the other hand, those of us with Gmail accounts have had little or no trouble. Although my Gmail inbox has gone up from roughly 2200 email conversations to 3100 conversations in these 3 weeks, I never felt as if I couldn’t manage to read content as it came in, or re-visit the content that I wanted to.

I also carry an offline version of Gmail (via POP3) on Mozilla Thunderbird. I have to create folders and filters all the time to manage the same email that I can easily view without a single folder using Gmail’s browser-based client. Somehow the “view thread” view in both Mozilla Thunderbird and IBM Lotus Notes doesn’t match upto the slickness of Gmail’s implementation. Perhaps that’s because the thread view is an additional feature, an afterthought, whereas Gmail was designed from the ground-up with the conversation view in mind. But it’s pretty certain that the conversation paradigm is the base for future evolution of email management. Conversations are currently the best way to preserve the context of information in an email thread, which is crucial. Lotus Notes does it very well by showing quoted text in a very easy-on-the-eye manner, but most other email clients just don’t compare.

HOWTO: Be more productive with the Nokia 6670

rahulgaitonde — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 13:50:00 +0000

The Nokia 6670 I bought recently has turned out to be a computer in itself. I’ve found myself using my ThinkPad less and less as the week’s gone by.

Email:
I’ve configured both my Gmail and RahulGaitonde.org POP3 accounts on the phone. The built-in email client does a very good job at retrieving, composing and displaying messages and their attachments. It’s also well integrated with the rest of the system, so I can click on most files and select “Send as email”. I’ve heard that Profimail’s the best email client out there, but i.) it isn’t nearly as integrated as the default mail client, and ii.) it isn’t free! After spending nearly Rs. 13000 for this beast, I’m not spending a paisa more :)

Internet Browsing:
Netfront is a decent browser. It loads reasonably fast, has Javascript support, renders pages quite well, supports SSL. All-in-all, I’m happy. The only thing is, it’s a pretty big application – if you’re running Netfront, you might not be able to open other heavy apps like RealPlayer. According to TaskSpy, while it itself is using 104KB of memory, Netfront (without loading any web page) is taking up 5104KB! I use Netfront and Opera alternately. Both are neck-and-neck in terms of features and usability, but then again, Opera’s only a 14-day evaulation. I don’t see why. Opera is now a free download for Windows and Linux, without the ads, so why not for Series 60? How long before browsers on mobiles outnumber those on desktops? Think issue: Business models for broswer-based ISVs.

In any case, having an Internet browser on your mobile phone is a great timesaver. It takes my bus about 30 minutes to reach my workplace. I use that time to catch up on my personal email, daily news and blogs. By the time I’m at work, I can be productive right away.

The Nokia PC Suite is a wonderful way of connecting to your phone. You can use either the provided data cable, or Infrared (which newer phones such as this one don’t support aynmore), or Bluetooth.

I use the Nokia Phone Browser all the time to manage documents and contacts on my phone, through an Explorer-like interface:

Another fantastic component is the Nokia PC Sync. I can sync my Lotus Notes calendar, address book and TODO list with my phone.

No more typing in stuff into my phone. Simply use Lotus Notes and hit “Synchronise”.

Speaking of not typing in stuff, you can send SMSes via Nokia’s Text Editor. It even integrates with your Address Book.

HOWTO: Using the Personal Journal in Lotus Notes

rahulgaitonde — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 15:06:00 +0000

There’s this database template in Notes by the name of Personal Journal, that’s invaluable for managing information. I don’t know what release of Notes this was introduced in, but those of you using R6 and up should find it.

Well, think of the Personal Journal as a kind of scrapbook. You can create journal entries, file them under zero or more (user-defined) categories, format the text with all the rich elements that you associate with a word processor, paste attachments in exactly the same manner as you do in a Notes email or Document Library.

We all have dozens of Word and text files lying around our Documents folder, right? Containing lists, tips, TODOs, email drafts, temporary code snippets, drafts of articles, and numerous other stuff. Now think of the Personal Journal as a way of consolidating all that data, being able to give all your data a consistent look and feel, being able to categorise it, perform all sorts of searches, including full text searches, leverage the advantages of it being a Notes database, like replication, the ease of being able to forward a Journal entry as an email through one click.

I have categories like Articles, Blog Post Drafts, Email Drafts, SANFS (that’s the product I work on at IBM), Defect Analysis (my work), and the default “Uncategorized” category. And I’ve only been using this for about three weeks, I’m sure I’ll add a lot more categories as time progresses. You can even create folders, and categories within folders. I’m not sure if entries can belong to more than one folder, but I don’t think so.

Since I discovered the power of the Personal Journal, I’ve been able to get rid of the HUGE amounts of small text files I’ve tried to maintain over the years. I have been tirelessly evangelising the Personal Journal here at IBM’s India Software Labs Pune, with very positive feedback! My TODO list is now a Journal Entry, a number of useless text files containing little UNIX/Windows tips accumulated over the years are now neatly arranged in a “Tips” file, which I can and do search extensively before I turn to Google for what I want. This kind of feature is right in line with the concept of Notes being the focal point for all your communication and collaboration.

If you use Notes at work, you ought to give the Personal Journal a try! Do email me if there’s a cool tip about the Journal that you’d like to share, and I’ll put it up here.

There are two products that Personal Journal ought to learn from:

Tomboy for the Linux desktop – http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy and
Microsoft OneNote.

I won’t go through what PJ should take from each product specifically, but here are a few improvements I’d like to see very much, in the Personal Journal of the future:

Be able to create links to documents that open in external applications. I’d like to be able to create a list of path links to MP3 files lying somewhere in My Music, then simply select this piece of text, and hit “Enter”. This should open up Winamp/Windows Media Player/whatever with this list as the curent playlist.
Alternatively, create links to emails, in drag-and-drop fashion, which could open up in my Notes Inbox. The possibilities are endless.
Links between Journal entries, like a Wiki. Tomboy does this in spectacular style. Personal Journal must be able to do this. In the future, we ought to be able to link to elements to other databases. Today, we can easily create links to entire databases, but we’d like specific elements within databases. At the very least, only in local replicas.
I’d also like my TODO list to be linked to my actual TODO database, or alternatively, my TODO database to be exported as a Journal entry. Now that I think about it, there needs to be greater interoperability between the calendar and the TODO database.
Being able to edit attachments, and have those changes show up in the original document. Like, for instance, I attach a Word document to a Journal entry, and edit it after opening it in the Journal, then all the changes that I make ought to be reflected in the actual Word document on disk, in my Documents.