Synchronising Contacts, but not to Default Outlook Folder

[drfrot]

Me again. :D

Don't particularly want to mix (or erase!)my work contacts with personal ones kept on the Psion, but would like to sychronise the Psion Contacts to another folder in MS Outlook in case of loss, and for occasional use

Have set up a new Personal Address book on Outlook, called it 'Psion Contacts', specified it should be recognised as an Outlook address book - it appears on my list of folders and address books.

I've specified its address in the Properties dialogue box and yes it appears in C:....local folders\applications\microsoft\outlook as a PAB file.

I've then tried synching using both 'Psion Contacts' and the path above as the folder, having unchecked the 'Default Folder' box, but whatever I do I get a message saying "Unable to open specified file" or "File not found"...

Any advances...?

Cheers - Giles

[Jim Cooke]

Giles,

Your plan works with anything but the Psion Contacts file. PsiWin will only sync Psion Contacts with the default Contacts folder in Outlook. Psion won the prize in the "What Were You Thinking?" contest by also not allowing you to mark contacts private so they wouldn't be synced as can be done with Agenda items.

When you changed the path in PsiWin, you told it that there's a Data file with the name "Contacts" that you want to use instead of Psion Contacts. Since there isn't any Data file with that name, you get the error message.

You can set up a Data file with the same labels as the Contacts app and then use that to sync with the subfolder in Outlook. The downside is that the e-mail app won't recognize this file as source for e-mail addresses and you'll have to be very careful to do your data mapping correctly between the Psion Data fields and the Outlook field labels to make sure that things sync correctly.

I'm thinking there may be a third-party application like Dream Connect that uses the Contacts store but allows you to mark contacts as private. I'm speaking strickly from memory so maybe someone else here will step in if thay have some information.

[drfrot]

Shame. Although I suppose I could copy all of my work contacts into another PAB file, set that as the default for use and storage of personal addresses in Outlook, and then overwrite the resulting blank contacts file with the Psion stuff...

...or does PsiWin home in on the 'specified' default folder like a heat seeking, overwrite-all synchroniser...?

G

[Jim Cooke]

In terms of using Psion Contacts with Outlook, PsiWin really does home in on just one folder. This is the default Contacts folder in Outlook that you can not delete either. There is a method to this madness. Many users had a lot of trouble getting fields in a Data file to map properly to Outlook fields. Contacts obviates this problem because it knows the exact field structure of Outlook and will always sync the corresponding fields in Psion Contacts correctly. The downside is the lack of customizing you're able to do with a Psion Contacts file.

You really need to set up a Data file with the same labels as Contacts and then sync that data file to a Contacts subfolder.