Outlook – Domino Connecter.

I was seduced, (for the third time), into installing the Microsoft Outlook Domino Connecter for the following reasons:

1. I wanted a single place to manage my RSS feeds, personal email, tasks, calendar and work email
2. My trial of mNotes completes in a few days and I needed to decide whether to buy it, or whether I could use Active Sync alone, (as my Local Notes replica would now also be in Outlook)
3. I would get a unified search environment, (because X1 would search my Notes data, which would now be in Outlook)
4. Graham said it works fine for him

I have tried it twice before, and had to give up both times, despite considerable effort.  I kept telling myself the problems were to do with the sequence I did things, by interactions with mNotes, X1 etc, because I did not leave it alone – i.e. I tried to use it!  Having tried again a few times these are some of the problems I have had:

1. Synchronisation is painfully slow
2. It does not synchronise according to a regular schedule, it just does it in the background, but not as frequently as I would like
3. It affects the stability of Outlook quite badly, Outlook has hung on me at least 3 times today
4. It created duplicate email and calendar entries, (never did figure out why, but assumed it was some sort of cascade effect caused by replica’s and mNotes).
5. I ended up with a corrupt document in my Local Replica, I am currently creating a brand new local replica to see if I can fix it
6. It does not handle standard s/mime signed documents, (gives a security subsystem error)
7. Formatting of some message is a bit strange
8. X1 tries to index entries as soon as the headers arrive, then triggers a pull of the body causing a dialog to keep opening up, very annoying
9. if you do a full synchronisation, you can not use Outlook until its complete, (either that or Outlook was hanging).

It’s the stability problem that was the killer for me.  I could have carried on trying to work through the other issues.  I also got worrying that there were some version issues, Windows 2003 Server, Outlook 2003, Notes 6.51 is hardly a combination that has been well tested!

So I have just trashed it yet again and gone back to good old Notes!  Which is surprisingly refreshing because it does work reliably.  I also like the fact that it’s nice and colourful, especially when you use custom colours for emails from certain people, and colour different calendar entry types!  I just hope this new replica works ok!