now that i've got xtndconnect installed, and it actually works ~pretty~ well with outlook. but it's lacking a lot of features.
feeling a little more brave, i thought i would try to sync my phonebook, not just calendar items. the shortcoming i found right away - there isn't enough logic on how to handle records. i've got too many phone numbers for my phone to handle. so i need to filter out numbers here, to get the one's i need, to fit in my phone's memory. this would be a shortcoming of my phone.
i've started to use the 'private' feature to mark numbers that should / should not go to the phone/external devices.
while it appears xtndconnect will let you 'filter' on many fields in the outlook records, the 'private' field is missing. this could potentially stem from versioning, and that i'm running outlook2003 - and it just has more fields than xtndconnect was designed for? that aside, i wasn't able to get the filtering it appears to offer to function much at all -- so i'm back to the custom software i developed for phone numbers.
i have found that it's pretty safe to use with outlook, i have 'prompt before deleting' enabled. the full/first time synchronization prompts for what to do, overwriting the phone, overwriting outlook, or adding records. even points out that the bidirectional sync could cause creation of duplicate records.
i would prefer to see these choices ahead of time, but at least it's smart enough to prompt the user.
it doesn't prompt when a record is merely updated, which is less desirable. trusync & intellisync does a much better job in this area, giving you a step by step prompt for each action.
oh, the help files report that the 'filter' property is not applied to the phone data, or outlook, or other pim software for that matter -- but "mypalm" only. huh? not sure 'bout that, but it explains why it doesn't work.
you can still use the individual record filter, but fo rme that means having to select/de-select a lot of records. i don't think that will work for me, i'm still mulling this over. maybe not so bad once it's all set up.