If Microsoft Outlook was a drug, for me I think it would be crack. When it came out in 96/97 (i can’t remember exactly when) I was addicted after about a day or two. It was by far better than anything else out there at the time. I went to great lengths to use it. When I was at BM in 1997 we used CC Mail. I went extraordinary measures to get outlook to work while still using the CC Mail system. Our mail admin (a friend of mine at the time) almost had kittens when she realized I was using a MAPI conduit getting CC Mail into Outlook. I had to promise never to tell anyone else that it was possible.
When I couldn’t use an exchange server somewhere (i don’t remember what job) I ended up building my own so I could have outlook with all my contacts and stuff both at home and at work.
Back in the day (meaning 2000 or so for this conversation) it was great. I would use it daily. it would be my central program no matter where I was or what I was doing. Email being a lifeline when I traveled and a necessity in every other job I have had.
Over the past 3 years (wow it has been exactly 3 years this month) I have gone from a curious interest in Mac’s to using one as virtually my primary machine at work, and almost exclusively at home. One problem I had was no outlook. First I used OS 9 classic outlook. it was a poor replacement for the real thing. My addiction stuck and I always went back to my PC for good old comfy outlook. The problem was around the time I started getting really into Mac’s I found that Outlook was not the great program it used to be. I was still stuck on it, but it would crash, perform slowly, etc. From XP to 2003 was a great improvement in looks, but everything else was horrible. yet I was addicted to using 2003. It sucked, and I knew it yet I still used it.
Late last year I bought Office 2004 for the mac. Entourage then became my poor alternative for Outlook. When I was on my Mac I would use it, but I still always went back to Outlook. My Treo (or any other Palm or Pocket PC I had) would sync with outlook. Whatever computer had my primary outlook PST file on it became my “main PC”.
Then Mac OS 10.4 came out. That along with the missing sync and a few other utilities allowed me to start weaning off of Outlook, and by extension Windows in general. First I moved everything into Entourage, but that became a similar drug like Outlook. It was bad, and yet I found I had no choice to use it, so I was stuck on it. I found some utilities that would sync apple’s iCal and Address book to Entourage and used that for the past 3 weeks. I have had so much data corruption because of the syncing I gave up on that idea.
I stopped using Entourage for my email last week, and moved over to Apple Mail. Integration makes me move programs. the integration between mail, address book, and ichat is amazing. All that was left was the PIN functionality I used in Outlook and more recently Entourage.
So today I start what I consider my final rehab. I backed up entourage and did one last synch to iCal and Address book. I then took my Treo and did a sync to those programs instead of Entourage. I hope this is the first day of my long future of not using Microsoft PIM’s. Even if my company goes to Exchange I can still use iCal. This solution isn’t without some trade offs. Some of them I haven’t even addressed yet, but I hope it is better than what I was doing before.
I haven’t done a sync to outlook in weeks. I only use it for IMAP mail when I am on a windows box. My PST files do contain email archives and contact archives going back to 1997, but I am using other programs to export that data to other formats that are less proprietary.
For now I am happy with my “rehab” of address book and ical. We shall see if I break down and go back, but I am hopeful I don’t.