Kent Compton : Hotmail

The Outlook Connector Part 2

Kentc — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:42:21 GMT

For those of you who want to only download the Outlook Connector you can go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9A2279B1-DF0A-46E1-AA93-7D4870871ECF&displaylang=en.

THE Outlook Connector

Kentc — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:30:00 GMT

In addition to the product planning I do for Windows Live, I also work with the Microsoft Office Outlook team on the Outlook Connector. What is the Outlook Connector you ask? It is a grossly underutilized sync solution for people who are both Hotmail users and who have Outlook 2003 or 2007. If you’re interested in the technical details of what it does, take a look at, Omar’s blog (my coworker in Windows Live). Basically, it syncs your Hotmail email, calendar, and contacts via a technology called DeltaSync (multiply the functionality of IMAP by 10x <g>).

Sadly, doing a search in your favorite search for the words “sync Outlook with Hotmail” (no quotes) yields very few results (other than Omar’s) for the Outlook Connector, so I doubt many people can find it. That’s a shame because I know from my research that people want to easily interchange work and personal items (mainly calendar and contacts). The Outlook Connector makes that possible! I use it on each of the 7 PCs I frequently use. Its incredibly powerful. If you receive an email to your work email account that is really personal when you reply you can change which account its sent from to be your Hotmail account. With Outlook’s side by side calendar support (see link and picture below), you can drag an appointment from your work calendar on the left to your Hotmail Calendar on the right.

You can get the Outlook Connector from http://download.live.com. If you install the entire Essentials suite and have Outlook on your PC it’ll be automatically installed. You can also just pick the OLC if for some reason you didn’t want the rest of Windows Live Essentials.

Here’s my cheap way of increasing the likelihood that someone will be able to find this post:

sync, synchronization, Hotmail, Outlook, 2003, 2007, Exchange, e-mail, calendar, contacts, Microsoft

:-)

“I’d like to try Hotmail but I already have an existing Email account”

Kentc — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Do you have existing non-Hotmail/Live email account that you’ve had for a number of years? Are you intrigued by the some of the new features and functionality of Windows Live Hotmail? Perhaps you’re running into the other provider’s email storage limit? Tired of having to mark all your email in Gmail with a category? Then I have a deal for you.

A company called TrueSwitch has technology that enables you to copy/export your email, contacts/address book, calendar, etc data from your current, non-Microsoft service (e.g. Yahoo) to Windows Live Hotmail (which includes email, contacts/address book, calendar, etc). Microsoft has an agreement with TrueSwitch so you can copy/export your mail et al from your existing account to Windows Live Hotmail without paying a fee. Here is a list of services that TrueSwitch supports:

The only “gotcha” I’ve seen using the service is all of the imported emails are shown/marked as unread. The workaround is to move all of the read emails in the current service into their own folder (perhaps named Read Email), and then migrate your account via TrueSwitch. Once all the email has been imported into Hotmail, you can then mark all of the email in the Read Email folder as read and then move them into your Inbox folder (that contains all of your unread email). The date and timestamps from the email are preserved so you won’t see the last six year’s email as if it’d all arrived today. Unfortunately, Gmail only has “categories” which I haven’t found a good workaround for yet. Suggestions welcome.

To test out Windows Live Hotmail with all of your real data from your “legacy” email service go to:

https://secure5.trueswitch.com/winlive/

NOTE: TrueSwitch only copies/exports the old account data, it does not move it. Nothing from your old account will be deleted.