Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Using Outlook with online programs can be a challenge and I have tried a number of scenarios for synching my Outlook info with online calendars and contacts at Google and Yahoo.

As you may have also read, I recently got a new SmartPhone and went through the process of synchronizing my Contacts and Calendar, using ActiveSync and also trying out Bluetooth and USB connectivity.

But what about the new rage — social networking? What can Outlook users do to synchronize their information in an application like Facebook? I decided to try a new free program called OutSync, that does exactly that.

To use it, you obviously need a working Facebook account and Outlook 2003 or 2007. OutSync is compatible with Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003.

The product seems to have been created by some Microsoft folks who are also Facebook users — I could be wrong but the URL is actually part of what seems like a personal site.

But the program downloads and installs quite easily, and when authorized, immediately begins to log in to Facebook.

Figure 1475

Next it locates the Facebook profiles that correspond to Outlook contacts within a convenient interface. You select the ones you want and click Sync.

Figure 1476

As you might expect, the main advantage is to visually connect with your Facebook friends in Outlook contacts — here my picture is downloaded into Outlook along with my personal info from Facebook.

Figure 1477

The application is free at the moment, and it's a great way to merge photos that have been uploaded in the social networking sphere with your own business contacts that correspond; otherwise you would need to import the picture individually.

This works well with my new SmartPhone because for mobile users the contacts in Windows Mobile will also have the pictures when synched.

You can find out more about the product and interact with other users, including the developer (who does in fact work at Microsoft) on the Facebook page for OutSync.

The product is still young and lacks some features users seem to want, like mapping of fields and pictures for names that are slightly mismatched, but for the price it's a nice beginning.

What is probably more intriguing is the burgeoning evolution of online social networking applications like Facebook and their inevitable influence on contact management software like Outlook, and its competitors ACT! and Goldmine.

I know that several of my Facebook contacts, who I discovered online as old friends, had to get an account purely for business — not for the social aspect but to connect with clients and colleagues.

This overlap of the personal and the business is happening online and it's only a matter of time until standalone applications like Outlook will need to account for it within their own feature set.

I suppose one alternative might be to connect your contacts to OfficeLive, which is still in beta but which we checked out in an update in August 2006.

It would seem that an online version of Office might make real time collaboration with others in a social network viable.

We know that real time communications is a priority with Microsoft from recent talks by Chairman Bill Gates. There are also aspects of real time available in the Groove Workspace, which became part of Office 2007.

In these scenarios what happens is that you can see the availability of those with whom you wish to communicate, which is the essence of Instant Messaging and Skype.

It's just a shame that the web currently has all of these disparate aspects. You can coordinate RSS and email in desktop Outlook 2007, message from Office Online, see availability in Groove or Communications Server and then network socially or otherwise with tools like Facebook or even MySpace.

The essential issue is integration. The buzz on Office Live is that it may be the future of SharePoint, Microsoft's other big collaboration tool. But it is still basically a closed portal, with no interoperability with online apps like Facebook.

The synching capability of the add-on described in this update would have to go way beyond seeing pictures in Outlook to make for a real business application. First the mapping features suggested for Facebook would need to be integrated; but some sort of groupware or collaboration that notified a Facebook individual contact or group and scheduled online meetings or events would be extremely helpful.

Otherwise, for example, you would have send separate invites via Facebook and Outlook to coordinate events on your calendar.

Since the synching should also work on a SmartPhone, another layer of interoperability is also required to truly connect online social apps to the world of Microsoft.

That's a shame, because the future of online social networks seems quite bright but making them play nice with Office is still a distant dream.

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