[From William] I have been using the Palm Desktop as my PIM manager since the late '90s. My Contacts are in the hundreds, my repeatable Calendar events are likewise in the hundreds and I have several hundres of snippets of information stored in Memos, aong with several Tasks. All of this information is viewed on my PC and Palm TX.
Unfortunately my firm has adopted the Blackberry Curve as the only handheld device it will support. How to get all my PIM information into the Curve? It can be copied piece by piece from the Palm Desktop into Outlook on the PC, but that takes time and effort!
Recently my firm gave me a new Lenovo Thinkpad T61 running Windows XP Professional. I had to load the Palm Desktop into it. I took out the CD that came with my Palm TX and started to install the Palm Desktop. After startup the CD asked the question do I want to use the Palm Desktop or Outlook to manage my PIMs. without hesitation or even thinking I chose the Palm Desktop to manage my PIMs and the installation went smoothly from then on.
A few days later I started to think: what if I had chosen Outlook to manage my PIMs? I then could have moved all my information over to Outlook. I closed the Palm Desktop application and inserted the CD once again to see what would happen? Instead of a reinsatll, I saw a dialog box with several choices one of which read:
Configure
Change your sync method
Switch between Palm Desktop and Outlook
I clicked on it and got another dialog box which read:
Use Palm Desktop to manage....
Use Microsoft Outlook to manage...
I clicked on Use Microsoft Outlook and got another dialog box which told me that Palm Desktop was managing my PIMs and asked if I wanted Outlook to manage my PIMs. I clicked "yes" and watched the Outlook conduits being installed into the Palm Desktop.
I opened Palm Desktop, went to HotSyn ->Custom and saw the Outlook conduits for Calendar, contacts, memos and Tasks. In each one I selected the option of having the handheld overwrite the Desktop to be certain that what I would be putting into Outlook was everthing in the Palm TX.
I ran hotsync and hoped for the best. When finished I got a log warning which indicated that some of my memos were too long for Outlook and that some of my repeatable events could not be duplicated in Outlook. (The Palm Desktop is a much better PIM manager than Outlook in many respects.) Otherwise every thing was copied over to Outlook and thanks to the magic of Exchange to my BB Curve!
I inserted the CD once again and reversed the process so that the Palm Desktop was once again my PIM manager. Happy again to be using the Palm Desktop.
It the occurred to me: why not copy the switching part of the CD to my hard drive so I could operate the switch without the CD. After some experimenting I could not find just the switching software, so I copied the whole CD minus all the foreign language. about 123 mbs. I put it in a folder called "Palm CD" and made a shortcut of the "autorun.exe" application called "Outlook Switch" which I added to the Start button. Now at least once a week I do a switch to update both Outlook and the Palm Desktop. I still prefer the Palm Desktop as my main PIM manager but this way my Curve and Palm TX exist in harmony.