[Bassey]

I've been looking at ways to remove Outlook 2007 from my home PC whilst retaining synching capabilities with my Touch Cruise.

Why?

Well, Outlook 2007 is painfully slow. This can be improved by turning off the background indexing but it still takes an age to start-up and, certainly over POP3, seems to take forever to download emails.

I was rebuilding my Vista PC anyway so decided to have a look at the alternatives. I've been using Firefox for a while so decided to try Mozilla's other products, Thunderbird (for email and contacts) and Lightening (calendar and tasks).

I won't go into details on these products, there are plenty of reviews out there if you want to know more. I'll just briefly say;

Thunderbird - Excellent and very fast for email. Woeful contacts interface, looks like Win95 Address cards
Lightening - Very good for both calendar and tasks. Not as good as Outlook and certainly not as pretty but perfectly functional and, again, very fast.

So, I had a whopping great .pst file from Outlook with a couple of thousand emails, 600 contacts and several hundred calendar events. How to get them over?

Firstly, Thunderbird will try to pull in the email and contacts straight from Outlook. Unfortunately, without Outlook installed, it couldn't do this. Just pointing it to the .pst file wasn't enough. So, I installed Outlook 2003 and then went back to Thunderbird. The option was now there and, admittedly, about 20 mins later, it pulled everything across, maintaining the folder structure of my emails - which was handy.

So, what about my calendar? Lightening cannot read outlook calendars. They use a completely different system. There are tools out there to convert. I tried a few free ones and got nowhere. I tried a commercial one (Outlook2iCal) which had a limited trial. This seemed to work but I wanted to see if I could do this myself before paying money for a one-off process.

My ultimate aim was to get synching working so why not try that and get Lightening populated from the calendar details on my TC?

I'd seen a news item on 4WinMobile a couple of months ago for BirdieSynch (http://www.birdiesync.com/home.html) which claimed to enhance WMDC such that it would work with Thunderbird and Lightening. So, I downloaded it.

The install was simple enough. A quick install on the PC and it then pushes a cab to your PPC - which you have to accept and allow it to install. Easy enough.

It then talks you through a few settings, both in WMDC itself and in Thunderbird. This done, it asks you to unplug the PPC and then plug it back in. I did this and a few moments later I had an error. I'd been rebuilding my PC for about four hours so it was probably in a right state and I was ready for bed so I left it.

A few days later, with some rare free time, I had another go. I uninstalled completely and tried again. This time, it started synching. A few minutes later it said it was complete. All my emails were intact, as were my contacts. However, my calendar items where missing from both the TC AND Lightening! Oops.

Thankfully, I maintain daily backups of the TC using SPB Backup - which allows me to restore just the PIM data. I figured BirdieSynch had tried to synch from Lightening to the TC first time around. If I restored the calendar items, it might think these had been added manually and synch them across. So, 30s later, SPB Backup had done it's thing and I reconnected. Success!

Everything was in Lightening. Recurring appointments, birthdays, public holidays, the lot!

I've now been running this setup for five days and it hasn't missed a beat. My emails are all synching okay as well, tasks work fine. I haven't updated any contacts but the picture phonebook on the TC has kept the pictures, despite these not being supported by Thunderbird - so that's good news.

All in all, I now have a VERY fast email/contact/calendar solution on my desktop PC, I haven't sacrificed PPC synching and, although the Contacts interface leaves a HUGE amount to be desired (they are working on this - apparently) I'm very happy.

As a brief aside, I've also installed OpenOffice rather than MS Office2007. It's not as sophisticated, but it seems to support all I need and is, again, a lot quicker and uses far fewer system resources.

I'll probably have to install Office in the end, for development purposes, but for now I'm Open-Source and loving it!