Goodbye Outlook

Exactly three years ago I noted there was no alternative for Microsoft Outlook. But this is no longer true. I have been using GMail for ages. For my private email address. For business, however, it took much longer to migrate. In my case it even took selling one company (the one using Outlook) and setting up a new one (the one that does not). OK this is a bit of irony. But the truth is at our new startup we are extremely, extremely happy with the Google Apps cloud service. We keep on discovering new things almost every day. It is hard to imagine people are still sending themselves DOC and XLS files as attachments. And that after a long editing work they are being asked "Save your changes"? This 30-year old paradigm of editing FILES looks very arcane today. But it still exists at the very heart of the world's most popular Office suite.

But back to the Outlook. As I posted in 2008, the really last thing I was using it for was contact management. It was simply a backup and consolidation place for all my devices using my contacts database. Windows Phone could sync to Outlook. Nokia could sync to Outlook. BlackBerry could sync to Outlook.

But recently I have started mulling on moving from BlackBerry to Android. The reasons are for one of the next posts, but today just worth mentioning is what has been keeping me back from doing that step. Migration of the contacts database. I have close to 1000 entries in it, quite decently organized. With current emails, phone numbers and addresses, where possible. And I have also switched to a new computer recently, where I installed Word and Excel but no Outlook. And I never installed the BlackBerry Desktop software on it either.

Yesterday morning It still seemed I would need to do both steps (BlackBerry Desktop and Outlook) to move my contacts database. But then it dawned on me there was an application called Google Sync. I used to use it for synching my calendar between Google/GMail and the BlackBerry. But it also had a "Synchronize contacts" option I had never turned on. So I flipped the switch.

After about ten minutes I had 922 new contacts in my GMail Contacts database. All nice and clean with all fields and pictures attached. Then I ran the "Merge duplicates" function which shrunk the list by 140 entries. And another flick of the switch on my Android tabled did the trick. They all moved nicely over to the Android device. Voila! No desktop software involved and no Outlook. This is what I call Cloud.

The era of desktop data is passing today. Whatever I have on my machine is a cache of what sits there in the cloud. Picasa photos. Youtube videos. Evernote notes and Dropbox folders. Gmail and Google Docs on top of it all.

What I am still missing is a synced copy of the state and configuration of my machine. Installed apps and metadata. Like on the Android phones and tablets and now even on the iOS devices. But I heard this is coming in Windows 8. Will be interesting to try this out!