Getting
My Contacts to Play Nicely with GoodLink on my Treo650
I love my Treo.
And I love GoodLink.
GoodLink is like having Outlook in the palm of my hand. Its better
than ActiveSync. And it works better than any Outlook setup on
a Windows device. However, as is always true of life, for all
good, there is some bad. Trade-offs must be made. For some time
now, one of those trade-offs dealt with GoodLink taking over my
contacts and causing other apps that try to read them to error
out. Thankfully, with the assistance of the good folks at Good,
I have a nice working solution to the problem.
First, the history... (small disclaimer: I am not a Treo/Palm
developer, so I can only speak from what I observe and what I
perceive to be the underlying issues). When GoodLink is installed,
it includes its own Contacts piece which for all intents and purposes
*replaces* the stock Palm contacts piece. The upside to this is
that clicking on Contacts in the Phone app gives you direct access
to your Personal contacts as well as your Corporate Exchange contacts.
The downside to this is that other applications like SnapperMail,
ChatterEmail,
KMaps,
etc fail when you try to do a contact lookup. In Snapper &
Chatter, I get a message saying I need to do the lookup from with
GoodLink. Thus, it appears that once the GoodLink contacts piece
is in place, other apps fail to access the stock Palm contacts
piece. You might ask why I'm using another email app when I already
have GoodLink installed? Simple... GoodLink gives me realtime
access to my corporate email and Snapper or Chatter give me access
to my personal email (3 different POP accounts in my case).
About a week ago, I emailed Good to submit a feature request (they
are really good about this, btw) to allow the GoodLink contacts
to be able to be read the same as the stock Palm contacts and
thus allow third party apps to access them. Of course, I recognized
there were some other possible ramifications to this request.
For one, all heck could break loose if this functionality then
allowed a 3rd party app to enter new contacts and it didn't do
so properly. Of course, read-only access would be a solution.
The other potential ramification is that most businesses wouldn't
like a user to use a 3rd party app to email corporate contacts
(ie: email business contacts from a personal email account) for
obvious reasons. In reply to my request, a Good support rep gave
me an "unsupported suggestion" for a fix that had worked
for others: simply delete the GoodLink Contacts piece of s/w.
So with nothing to lose, I backed everything up with BackupMan,
then also did a backup within GoodLink. I then went to the Application
Launcher and chose Delete. On a Treo650 (and I believe on a 600),
the GoodLink softwares are listed first. I saw:
GoodLink
Calendar
Compose
Contacts
Email
GoodAccess
Tasks
So I did a soft reset (to ensure that GoodLink wasn't running),
deleted Contacts, then another soft reset. Having done so, going
into the Phone app and choosing Contacts gave me absolutely nothing.
It was actually sort of scary for a few minutes. I restarted GoodLink
and went into the Contacts section of GL and saw that both my
Corporate and Personal contacts were all still present (thank
goodness).
The next step was to get my contacts restored, but I must digress
for a minute. With the Treo 600, the Palm s/w install CD gave
options similar to:
* Use Palm Desktop
* Sync with Outlook
* I use a 3rd party sync (GoodLink)
With the 650 it was a bit different, but offered to either sync
with Palm Desktop or Outlook. I had always chosen not to sync
with Outlook as I didn't want GoodLink syncing with it to interfere
with it trying to sync out of GoodLink. The end result was the
the Outlook conduits were never installed and these were needed
to get my contacts read out of Outlook and into my Palm Contacts.
On my Palm CD in the English\PostInstall directory was a file
called "OutlookSwitcher.exe". Double-clicking on it
in Explorer gave an error window that said:
"No parameter passed. Pass either /palm or /outlook".
So, I opened up a command prompt and browsed to the directory,
then ran "OutlookSwitcher.exe /outlook" and it started
a wizard that installed the Outlook conduits.
The next step was to open up Palm Desktop and choose HotSync ->
Custom. I set "Calendar (Outlook)" to "Do Nothing"
(this is important... f it syncs, then I'd have both the GoodLink
calendar and the Palm Calendar giving me meeting reminders at
the same time). I also set "Tasks (Outlook)" to "Do
Nothing" for the same reason. I have a habit of using the
Palm Memos application and wanted it to continue to sync, so I
set "Memos (Outlook)" to "Synchronize the files".
Now my Palm Memos are synced into my Outlook Notes (which also
means they're in the GoodLink Notes), but at least their sync'd.
The important item here, though, was to set "Contacts (Outlook)"
to "Synchronize the files". For each of the changes,
I also put a bullet in the "set as default" option.
After these changes were made, I simply did a hotsync. When done,
all my personal Outlook contacts were on my Treo. Best of all,
SnapperMail and ChatterEmail, as well as KMaps, can read out of
them just fine. So now, if I go into Phone -> Contacts I see
and can dial all my personal contacts. For corporate contacts,
I simply go into GoodLink -> Contacts, then dial them (my personal
contacts are actually in here as well... its as though GoodLink
has both business & personal contacts, but Palm Contacts has
only personal). New contacts entered through GoodLink are sync'd
to my local Outlook client immediately and make their way into
my Palm contacts on the next hotsync. New contacts added into
local Palm contacts (such as when someone calls me and after the
call I'm offered the option to add the number to my contacts)
are put into Outlook (and eventually GoodLink Personal contacts)
at the next hotsync. In the end, its not a direct path to anything,
but an indirect path to everything. Plus, since only my personal
contacts are being hot-sync'd, Chatter & Snapper can only
read from my personal contacts and thus I don't have to worry
about every accidentally emailing a business contact from a personal
account.
Lastly, in the phone app, I now also have the "Export to
SIM" option which let's me A) backup my contacts and B) easily
move them to another phone if necessary.
