Arpan

We need to appraise Microsoft on some wonderful sync software that is available and can definitely be written if they think like a user!

I am a Nokia (mobile phone brand) fan and currently using the Nokia E50 mobile phone (Email, Word, Excel, etc all in the phone). The best part of the s/w (PC Suite 6.82) that came with it is that it gives a neat uncluttered and detailed report of what it just did when you synchronise your phone with the desktop (Outlook et al) apart from providing a host of fantastic utilities in a clean interface.

Each time I connect my E50 to the USB, it gets ready to perform all actions (I prefer to keep it manual) and the moment I say synchronise, it goes ahead .... does its job and gives me a report of every modified field in outlook that was before sync and now after sync, so I know what actually transpired during the synchronising.

In the other case, whenever Activesync syncs my X5 with outlook, it just does something and then I pan through my records kind of guessing what 3 updates it would have just made!!

I had to format my PC recently and reloaded all s/w (ofcourse).... so when I synced my X5 with the PC, it said 354 contacts updated, 7 notes updated and so on, making atleast 15 contact duplicate entries and so on! I had to sit and delete all extra contacts and numerous calender entries it created; believe me they were identical records, not even a punctuation mark difference.:rolling:

After this when I synced my E50 with the Outlook (of course my .pst files for both devices are different) it said "Matched items : 366" and I was totally thrilled that I did not have to search thro' the records again! It was such a great experience. :approve: In fact whenever it even makes modifications, it clearly says "Modified contents:"Phone to PC PIM or otherwise and points out the fields it changed.

Microsoft should learn a thing or two from such smaller cos about how to make life easier for users than just send WGA nags and "critical updates" that mess up with your computing!

Alastair

This is a good point - I often have the same duplicate entry problem in Outlook and for whatever reason AS screws up my X51v every so often and the subsequent reconnexion then screws up everything else. I also use Palm and like Nokia it allows you to choose when you sync - it doesn't have the feature for telling you it has matched entry's but on the whole it can be less problematic than AS. Though having said that with me X50v running WM2003SE I never have problems.