After fighting with MLO Outlook sync and not being able to get it working properly, I am adopting Dwight's workaround. For whatever reason, the MLO and Outlook sync simply don't reliably support the following use case:
I want to mark emails in my company's email system as tasks, and have them automatically sent from Outlook to MLO, where I manage the task execution. If possible, I would like the tasks completed in MLO to be either deleted in Outlook or marked as complete there. It seems I have tried every possible combination of the Outlook sync parameters. There is no combination that does this. (I am still stuck on Outlook 2007 in my company, but I doubt if 2010 or later changes this MLO behavior) Among other approaches I tried, I was using the approach of assigning Outlook tasks a category of "MLO" to limit the tasks I wanted to sync from Outlook to MLO. The following very unacceptable outcomes result: - The Outlook root task, "<OutlookTasks>" in my setup, gets created, and my existing MLO tasks get completely rearranged and stuck under the <OutlookTasks> folder in seemingly random fashion. - When I try to sync Outlook -> MLO, my active MLO tasks all get shot up to Outlook as tasks; not at all what I want; I don't want to manage *anything* in that clunky Outlook monstrosity. I only want to use Outlook as a source of a few selected tasks, based on incoming email, and send those email-derived tasks to MLO. - If I delete, in Outlook, the MLO-sourced tasks that wound up showing up in Outlook after a sync, on the next sync, the tasks I deleted in Outlook get deleted from MLO, seemingly no matter what settings I use. It may be possible, by defining a to-do view in MLO to limit the tasks, to get better behavior. Possibly allowing the Outlook settings to default to mentioning the "Active Actions" view is the source of the problem. However... My conclusion: The behavior of MLO Outlook sync, with the use case I am trying to do, is seemingly random, unpredictable, and uniformly bad, destroying and scrambling my tasks around. For whatever reason, MLO simply doesn't reliably support this way of operating. It shouldn't be this hard to get a simple, common approach to work, and I've already spent way too much time on it compared to the limited benefits. Thus I've chosen to STOP trying to get MLO Outlook sync to work, and to just use the workaround Dwight mentioned. It seems to work fine to just select the tasks you want in Outlook, and drag-and-drop them into the MLO Inbox, and to NOT use MLO Outlook sync at all. James On Wednesday, May 22, 2013 12:38:39 PM UTC-7, Thomas Backhaus wrote: > > Hi Dwight, > > thanks, that sound like a nice work-around. If I indeed stumbled on a bug > and there's currently no way of correcting for it, I'll definitely give it > a go! > > Thomas > > > On Wednesday, May 22, 2013 8:20:30 PM UTC+2, Dwight Arthur wrote: >> >> Hi, Thomas. I'm not sure if this will help you or not. I have a fairly >> similar process but I don't use outlook sync. While reviewing my emails I >> set the followup flag on each item that requires a task. When I'm done I >> click the flag in my inbox header to get a view grouped by flag setting. >> Then I select all flagged emails and drag them to an MLO window >> displaying >> the inbox, where I drop them. Then I flip back to Outlook and hit >> "delete." >> >> The task created in MLO has the email subject as its title and the email >> body as the note. At the top of the note there's a link that you can >> click >> to bring up a view of the original email message (as long as you have not >> emptied MLO's trash. There are no subsequent syncs of any kind so the new >> tasks stay put until you are done with them. >> -Dwight >> >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/cca2b76e-33a5-49f9-a0dc-4ec2d47af25d%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
