Anyone using iPod Touch with Outlook 2003?

Hi there,

I'm contemplating dumping my old Palm Pilot Zire 71 for an iPod Touch. I like the idea of having Internet access, my music files and work-related items all on one device, especially when I'm on the road.

However, our office operates on MS Outlook 2003, and I want to know if I'll be able to sync my Touch with my Outlook calendar, contacts and tasks. I've read on a few forums where people have successfully synced their Touch with Outlook, but I thought I would check in with the experts here, too!

I guess an alternative would be to access all of these items via MS Outlook Remote Access on the Internet.

Thanks for your help!
Carrie

Hi Carrie,

You can definitely sync with Exchange as long as there's a WiFi connection for you. Do you know if your company uses Exchange as the server for Outlook on the backend? In my opinion, this would be the best option as when you email when you're out of the office (say home or Starbuck's), it will sync through Internet connections and your calendar, contacts, email all stay up to date wether you're in the office or not.

In case you don't have Exchange, here's a guide on how to sync an iPhone with Outlook via iTunes - seeing as iPhone use the same software as the iPod Touch, the process should work fine for you. It looks like this method only does Calendar and Contacts, though. If you need to use this method because you don't have Exchange, see if you have access to your email server via IMAP (actually, try to use secure IMAP, sometimes called IMAPS). This might assist you in remote emailing. Unless you are downloading your email from a server outside your company into your Outlook and it deletes mail from the server.

If you end up POPing email to the smart phone, a trick I've started to use is to set up another email account for the smart phone user, then store and forward email from the user's main account to the secondary account.

(In my case the secondary account is through Gmail so there is a 2GB mail box) then the Outlook client can retrieve and delete email all day, and the smart phone has it's own mail box to retrieve from at it's leisure.

This solves the problem of leaving email on the server for the main account, and having either the mail box over flow when it is stored for a day, or having outlook retrieve the same message multiple times due to handshaking errors.

By setting up the reply to address in the smart phone and a permanent BCC for all sent messages from the phone, the user is able to keep up between their desktop and smart phone.


Dave

Thanks, Chris! Our organization does have an Exchange server backing Outlook, so it sounds like I'm in good shape.

And, thanks, Dave, for your tips, too!

Awesome! Here's a guide on how to set up your account on your device. Make sure you're using at least the 2.1 version of the software for it.

Perfect, thanks again Chris!

Glad to help! I'd like to hear back how it all works out for you. Tell your systems administrator that it would make your device work better if you could access the Exchange server from the same host name regardless of which network you're on. For example, if you were accessing your Exchnage server from home via the host name "mail.npo.org", then your internal network at work would also have to know how to translate "mail.npo.org"

I say this because some administrators will put their mail servers on their private IP lan. Let's say it's on 10.1.1.10 as an IP address. But the public IP address (when you're not in the office) could be 209.88.43.142. It's up to your administrator to make sure than when you're in the office, "mail.npo.org" = 10.1.1.10 and when you're out of the office it matches the other address. Sorry if that's confusing.

I've been looking hard for several months now, and I still haven't found any acceptable way to sync Outlook Tasks and Outlook Notes to the iPhone or iTouch. Contacts and Calendar are a breeze and sync flawlessly. I'm currently having to carry my Palm in order not to lose my extensive Notes, and I am trying out Toodledo.com as a web-based Task program that syncs nicely with ToDo, a program for the iPhone.

I haven't used them yet but was searching for something to sync to Outlook Tasks to my ipod touch and my windows mobile phone and have found a couple of promising looking options.

One is $10/year and syncs to the "cloud".
http://www.chapura.com/keytasksiphone.php

It doesn't appear to offer notes syncing, however.

It seemed like the open source and free Funambol apps and service might provide this functionality eventually but it wasn't clear from their own site this was true. I read a post elsewhere that claimed it would eventually sync all sorts of outlook stuff with a combo of their outlook plugin and their iphone app.

Funambol - Wirelessly sync your iPhone contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes

http://my.funambol.com/

c4ian, thanks so much for the Funambol info. I'd been looking for a way to transfer my contacts from my Palm to my iPhone and Funambol did the trick. It was pretty easy to use and a very simple interface. It also seems syncs my Outlook calendar and I wish it could do so with my Google calendar. It doesn't sync tasks or notes for the iPhone or iPod yet, but it can do this for Windows Mobile devices and Blackberrys. Getting closer...Let me know if you found another solution.

 

Best,

 

Megan