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Syncing Outlook and Mac address books using Plaxo
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Plaxo has been around for some years primarily as a novel online application to ensure that your own contact details are always current with your contacts. By signing up to Plaxo and making sure that you keep your own details up to date, Plaxo will make sure that all of your contacts who are also on Plaxo will be notified whenever you update your contact details. This is quite a useful service and that was about it.
But with the emergence of social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, this need that Plaxo need served soon became less important. After all, if you are linked in with all your contacts, there is no need to directly communicate contact detail changes to them as long as everyone is connected in the same social network. They will know how to find you via Linked In or Facebook and the like.
Not resting on its laurels, Plaxo has also jumped on to the social networking bandwagon and has morphed itself into a social networking service with Plaxo 3.0 (fashionably still in beta). With Plaxo 3.0, Plaxo is also making a play against the likes of Google and Yahoo as 3.0 allows you to maintain an online address book, tasks, notes and calendar. Here's the great thing with 3.0 that I love, Plaxo has also built integrating or sync points into Outlook, Mac Address Book, AOL and the usual web mail suspects. With Plaxo 3.0, I've finally managed to reach address book and calendar nirvana. My Nokia smartphone, Windows work laptop, home Mac laptop and iPod touch now all work off the same address book and calendar data. That's pretty awesome right ?
Getting there is pretty easy but it helps if you have a plan and do things in a certain order. The key thing is to pick a starting point. In my case it was my Outlook address book and calendar on my work Windows laptop as it's the one that I update most regularly. First order of business is to clean up the Outlook address book by merging duplicate contacts and deleted out dated contacts. This is vitally important. Once you have a clean master address book, make a backup of it before you do anything else just in case the sync process pollutes it.
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Plaxo has been around for some years primarily as a novel online application to ensure that your own contact details are always current with your contacts. By signing up to Plaxo and making sure that you keep your own details up to date, Plaxo will make sure that all of your contacts who are also on Plaxo will be notified whenever you update your contact details. This is quite a useful service and that was about it.
But with the emergence of social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, this need that Plaxo need served soon became less important. After all, if you are linked in with all your contacts, there is no need to directly communicate contact detail changes to them as long as everyone is connected in the same social network. They will know how to find you via Linked In or Facebook and the like.
Not resting on its laurels, Plaxo has also jumped on to the social networking bandwagon and has morphed itself into a social networking service with Plaxo 3.0 (fashionably still in beta). With Plaxo 3.0, Plaxo is also making a play against the likes of Google and Yahoo as 3.0 allows you to maintain an online address book, tasks, notes and calendar. Here's the great thing with 3.0 that I love, Plaxo has also built integrating or sync points into Outlook, Mac Address Book, AOL and the usual web mail suspects. With Plaxo 3.0, I've finally managed to reach address book and calendar nirvana. My Nokia smartphone, Windows work laptop, home Mac laptop and iPod touch now all work off the same address book and calendar data. That's pretty awesome right ?
Getting there is pretty easy but it helps if you have a plan and do things in a certain order. The key thing is to pick a starting point. In my case it was my Outlook address book and calendar on my work Windows laptop as it's the one that I update most regularly. First order of business is to clean up the Outlook address book by merging duplicate contacts and deleted out dated contacts. This is vitally important. Once you have a clean master address book, make a backup of it before you do anything else just in case the sync process pollutes it.
Okay, the next is to sign up for Plaxo if you haven't done so already. Once in Plaxo, follow the process to add a "sync point" for Outlook. Look at the bottom section of the address book tab of Plaxo. As a part of this process, you will need to download and install the Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook. This is one piece of the synchronisation magic. When Plaxo guides you through the set up process, it is good to keep a good eye on the settings to make sure that you are syncing up the right folders in Outlook with the corresponding folders in Plaxo. Once this is installed and once you've de-duped your Outlook contacts, hit the sync button and watch all those contacts and calendar events flow into Plaxo. At the completion of the initial sync, log into Plaxo and verify that all the information has corrected been ported over.
My first attempt resulted in some messed up contact information. For some reason some of my contacts first and last names were reversed or concatenated in some weird fashion. Another problem I found is that when I tried to correct these errors directly within Plaxo, the updates did not flow back to Outlook. So I had to fix these errors in Outlook and the updates flowed back to Plaxo. Not sure why this happened.
Once you've verified that the sync between Outlook and Plaxo is working correctly, the second step in this process is to add another sync point between Plaxo and my Mac by installing the Plaxo Toolbar for Mac OS X. As I had no data in my Mac address book and calendar applications, once I hit sync, all the data that's now in Plaxo immediately updated my Mac. After the initial Mac sync, I added a new contact and event to my Outlook and within a minute, these updates were automatically synced over to my Mac by Plaxo ! Love it !
Getting the data on to my iPod touch was a cinch once the data made it into the Mac address book and calendar as iTunes support the synchronisation of these two applications with my iPod touch. I did not have to do anything to sync my Nokia e61i as it is a smartphone that communicates directly with my work's Exchange server so its address book and calendar are already in sync with Outlook.
Once I got over the initial speed bumps, Plaxo works wonderfully to enable multi-platform and multi-device contact and event synchronisation. I love it when technology works. How can Plaxo improve its service ? I've got to say that its online help is woefully inadequate. They really need to invest in improving the online help support to make this process easier and especially to ensure that no data is corrupted by this multi-application synchronisation process.
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- Posted by:
- Chris at
03.03.2008 / 20:10
Last updated 07.09.2010
- Category:
- Technology
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