The Outlook is circular

Remember the start of this epic voyage of email and PIM updating started with a desire to move away from Outlook. Where has it ended up? Back with Outlook, that’s where.

A few reasons:

• Try as I might, it’s hard to escape Microsoft’s marketing muscle – in this case translated into compatibility with the portable devices I use (IPAQ and Nokia phone/PIM) and others that I might consider using in future. The sheer market weight of Outlook means that manufacturers are compelled to provide at least some level of data interchange with Outlook and, while I did discover products and add-ons to programs such as Thunderbird that aim to do the same thing, they are all affected by the problems that surround Open Source “products” (which I will get round to discussing some time soon, I promise).
• Office 2007 appeared and is a substantial step forward for Outlook. While still some way from my ideal (that I can’t find elsewhere in any case) it is better at organising tasks and calendar and, even in beta form, proved more reliable than the alternatives (Thunderbird, The Bat, Eudora, Pocomail) that I tried – several of which lost data (or would have, had I not been strict about keeping backups.