Well, here's my story: After leaving IBM (and Lotus Notes) I started using Outlook because it made sense to me to have my address book in the same place my email is. I can add information to the address book from email, and can email anyone in my address book. Having one's address book separate from one's email never really made sense to me.
That's where I started. Other advantages I picked up along the way: Switching from one Palm device to the next (I very nearly buy 'em all) is made much easier with Outlook since the data stays in Outlook even as I uninstall and reinstall the Palm software. No worries about my .dat files getting lost in the process: it's all in Outlook. I can drag an email to the task icon in OL2003 and create a task from an email. Same for a calendar entry. There is all sorts of fiddling one can do with views of tasks to make them fit one's preferences. The only thing I really haven't liked about Outlook is the Memos function. It's modeled on yellow sticky notes and it sucks big time. No scroll bars; no undo function, etc. etc. It's really inferior. It could easily be improved. Perhaps it has been in OL2007? Enter the Treo 700p with Versamail that is capable of syncing with Exchange not only email, but contacts and calendar. Someone recommended I give it a try and I would never go back. OK, never say never, but you'd have to twist my arm pretty hard to get me to go back. It's just so darned handy to have those data elements sync over the air automatically. No Hotsync required. And having push email turns out to be handier than I'd've thought. That's probably a pretty sketchy summary, but it gives some of the highlights of why I use Outlook, and am looking forward to using OL2007 when my hosted Exchange company gives it to me for free, sometime in the next couple of weeks. BTW, I'm using 1and1's hosted Exchange service, and aside from some language difficulties with technical support I'm pretty happy with the price performance ($7/month/mailox). Finally, and I know this is heresy in the Palm world (and with apologies to CESD, whom I admire), but I've never really become enamored of Datebkn. I think it's kinda like golf, which I also don't particularly care for: everybody but me seems to just rave about Datebkn (like golf) and get a great deal of benefit from it. But not me. It strikes me as too hard to use and during the two brief times (most recently: yesterday) I've tried it on my 700p it's crashed quite a bit -- databases becoming corrupt and so on. I want to like it, like I want to like golf, but I just don't -- so I can't help you there! Cheers, Don -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of J Messeder Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2007 6:40 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Treo] Outlook/Exchange I changed the title because I have another question. If this isn't the same as starting a new thread, is there an effective way other than going to the Yahoo Group site? Now the question: I'm one of those who merely rebels at Microsoft owning my computer. On the other hand, I use MS Office 2003. On the other other hand, I also use Thunderbird and Firefox. I use IE7 at work and I hate it, maybe because I'm not used to it, but there it is. But I've had more empirical reasons for not using Outlook, having to do with the way it handled contacts, didn't allow for scheduled outgoing emails (I know T-bird doesn't either, but when I was trying Outlook I was running Eudora). So -- and this is a serious question: why would I, a guy who handles three POP accounts on the Treo, want to switch from the Palm Desktop to Outlook/Exchange combo? What might be some of the advantages. Short of loading the latest MS software from disk, I'm thinking this is a good way to find out. (Please tell me some of the DB6 functionality not available in Palm Desktop is available in Outlook -- that could be a big seller.)
