No Alternative For Microsoft Outlook

Last week I found myself in a situation prompting me to figure out the new setup for my virtual office. My previous setup was mainly based on the Microsoft Exchange 2007. My laptop running Outlook 2007 with local cache of all mail / contact / calendar items residing on a server. Windows Mobile 6 powered smartphone on top of it, synchronizing everything over the air via the ActiveSync protocol. This worked flawlessly. I had all emails and contacts and calendars in sync all the time. My phone, my laptop plus a working copy on the Exchange server. The challenge now has been to do the same, sans Exchange. So I started thinking about my new setup. These days we tend to sore everything in The Cloud (the Internet). I use GMail and Google Documents for my private stuff a lot, so my first steps were to try setting up everything around Google services. I soon found out this was not that simple.

Starting with contacts, my first goal was to move my database of contacts from Microsoft Outlook to Google Mail. My first surprise was there is not an easy way to do this. I used to think everything connects to Outlook. Not that true. Google accepts only CSV (Comma Separated Values) file you can produce with Outlook, but after the first trial import I found it did not work. Everything went into the "notes" field. No names, phones, streets, faxes... no structure. CSV has a concept of a "header row", where data columns are described with names. My header row was in Polish, but this was not the only problem. After digging here and there I found some help on the Google Forums (why o why they have not described the CSV structure in the help pages?). After preparing the proper CSV file with contacts I discovered Google Contacts has just one field for "Name". No first / last name. That means when you sync such database to a phone, you will no be able to select sorting criteria by either first or last name. That was enough. I dropped the Google Contacts concept all together.

My second target to try as the master database of contacts was ZYB. Zyb used to be my favorite concept of a VAS (Value Added Service) for years but to be honest I never tested it thoroughly. I downloaded a trial version of the Nexthaus SyncML client for Outlook (ZYB is SyncML based) and soon my contacts were visible on Zyb. Then I tried to sync my test iPhone to it. iPhone does not support SyncML natively, but there is an application called Synthesis (available via the iTunes store) that helps here. First synch went fine (but that is easy...). So immediately I pushed the "synch" button again and it trashed my newly created ZYB database all together. I mean the contacts remained there, but all the accented characters were lost and garbled. The only solution here was getting rid of accents at all, but hey, this was acceptable in the 7-bit ASCII world, not in today's Unicode...

So after Google and Zyb it seems Outlook is still the place to keep your contacts. Even iTunes can synch to it locally and transfer the contacts to the iPhone. It seems unbelievable nobody has been able to come out with a good "Cloud" alternative for Outlook. Or may be there is one, I am just unaware of?