Shedding Some Light

One of the great things about the MVP Summit is the discussions with MVPs outside of your core group. In my case I had the opportunity to talk with someone who is an Outlook MVP about some of my Outlook headaches. She is pointing me to a tool to help me migrate my PST file to the Outlook 2007 format. Christof Wollenhaupt told me to expect my file size to double because the file is upgraded to support Unicode and this takes twice the bytes. He also told me I should be able to see the Russian spam easier. Cool. This is another thing I was wondering about. When I read Web Mail on my Windows Mobile phone I see the Russian character set, but in Outlook it looks like garbage text.

The other thing I learned is an explanation for something that has bugged me about Outlook, but not something that has affected performance or organization of the PST and the 2GB limit. Each time I do a send/receive pass I see the message “Sending Message 12 of 12″ even when I do not have any messages in my Outbox. I have always thought this was a bunch of return receipts clogged in my Outbox, but I have guessed wrong. This is a bug. It has a direct correlation to the number of email accounts I have set up in Outlook. If I add a new account it would say “Sending Message 13 of 13″. This must be a seriously pain in the neck bug to figure out, or simply not a high priority, because I know the bug has existed as far back as Outlook 2003.

I swear this must be a full moon as my software frustrations with Palm and likely Microsoft continue today…

I get home this evening. I have a list of 24 things to do before I leave for the airport in the morning to head to Seattle. I check the mail and see a postcard from Palm telling me to immediately download a Daylight Savings Time (DST) patch for my one year old Treo 700W. Great, just what I need. Last weekend I spent an hour updating all my computers with the XP DST patch, now I have to get the phone updated with no time to do it.

I pop open the PC and download email and set up my phone to sync using ActiveSync 4.1, which is the version I got with the phone. I just installed it on my new machine several weeks ago. I get an email from Palm noting that I better update my Windows Mobile machine with the DST patch. This email was delivered at 7:07pm EST, after the workday on the day before the new Daylight Savings Time kicks in here in the USA. Less than 37 hours before the deadline. Who decided this was a good idea?!?!?

Reading through the steps I have to upgrade to ActiveSync v4.5. So I do. I follow the steps as I am instructed as a good user should. What does this get me? How about a whole new Active Sync profile. What does this mean? It means that the PC and the phone are being completely reintroduced to each other as if they never met before. What the heck?!?!? Shouldn’t one think it should perform an upgrade when you go from 4.1 to 4.5 and it would use the same settings? Thanks Microsoft, nice work.

So now I have to reset all my options and make sure I don’t lose anything. Never the case though as SplashID (tool I use to store all my passwords) dumped the database. I have to reconnect it to the phone, cross my fingers and pray the passwords stored on my phone sync back to the now empty database on my phone. Fortunately I recovered all the information and was able to recall a password I changed just before I left a client today.

Thanks for making my night Palm and Microsoft. What are you guys thinking? Just in Time compiles are one thing, but Just in Time Deployments (JITD) are INSANE. All I got to say is: this patch better work!!!! Can’t wait to see how all this works Sunday morning.

And don’t even get me started on the moron congress people who thought this was such a great idea. I doubt they had even a slight clue on the impact they had the day they voted for the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Before this little detour the only thing I did on my list was eat dinner. Twenty-three items to go. No problem, my flight is not until 9:30am. Argh.