Exchanging Exchange

My hosted Exchange provider started act­ing weird again recently, and I decided I’d had enough. At the same time, the new Live Mesh client that was sup­posed to improve com­pat­i­bil­ity with Win­dows 7 started caus­ing my net­book to freeze up (solid, no mov­ing the mouse pointer even) about five min­utes after boot­ing up. Now while the ratio­nal thing might be to switch to a dif­fer­ent Exchange provider, I decided to shake up my whole com­put­ing ecosys­tem and see what was involved in liv­ing La Vida Google.

Exchange email to Gmail

This was prob­a­bly the eas­i­est tran­si­tion to make, because of the way I was using my email in the first place. When some­one sends me an email to jeff@jeffkirvin.net, it goes first to my domain host, then redi­rects to Gmail, then gets aut­o­for­warded to my Exchange provider. So all I had to do was turn off that for­ward­ing, and start using Gmail as my mail client instead of Out­look. Frankly, this has worked out bet­ter than I expected on my net­book, since I don’t have the over­head of run­ning Out­look to deal with any­more. A lot less ran­dom (The pro­gram is not respond­ing) mes­sages in title­bars now.

It was a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing to make the switch from Exchange to Gmail as the email client on my phone. Win­dows Mobile is, obvi­ously, designed to work with Exchange. Set­ting it up for any­thing else is a lot less auto­matic. I opted to go with Google’s IMAP option rather than POP, which meant I wasn’t able to use Microsoft’s auto­mated setup (which defaults to POP). I went with IMAP for two rea­sons. One, it syn­chro­nizes with other mail clients should I decide later I’d rather use some­thing like Win­dows Live Mail or Mozilla Thun­der­bird on my Win­dows 7 machines instead of Gmail’s web inter­face, and two, it sup­ports sub­fold­ers for labeled items, par­tic­u­larly starred items. I went through the man­ual IMAP setup instructed pro­vided by Google, and have email sync­ing to my Touch Pro with­out a hitch. It’s not push, like my Exchange email was (Google doesn’t fully sup­port the IMAP IDLE pro­to­col), but I’m okay with pulling new mes­sages every 15 min­utes. In fact, I might even change that to 30 or even 60 min­utes to reduce dis­trac­tions. If some­one needs to con­tact me quickly, there’s always SMS, Twit­ter, or an actual phone call.

Exchange cal­en­dar to Google Calendar

This was a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing. First I recre­ated every recur­ring appoint­ment I had in Exchange in Google Cal­en­dar. I could have exported from Out­look to .csv and then imported into Google Cal­en­dar, but I have only a dozen or so recur­ring appoint­ments and very few one-​off appoint­ments, so it was prob­a­bly faster to just recre­ate them, espe­cially given how easy it is to cre­ate new appoint­ments in Google Cal­en­dar. That took care of the desk­top easy enough, but mobile is a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing. For that, I had to down­load Goosync. A one year sub­scrip­tion is about $30, or you could go for $60 for a life­time sub­scrip­tion. This is way less than I was pay­ing for hosted Exchange, so it seemed like a no-​brainer. I down­loaded and installed the Goosync Win­dows Mobile client and set it to sync my cal­en­dar and con­tacts. It runs in the back­ground and syncs every half hour, which seems to work okay. Appoint­ments on the device retain full fidelity includ­ing repeat set­tings and alarms.

Exchange con­tacts to Gmail

I solved this the same way I solved the cal­en­dar issue, with Goosync. The one prob­lem I had was that I need to re-​add my con­tact pho­tos and weed out dozens of incom­plete con­tact records Google saved for me auto­mat­i­cally that I really don’t want. Once they’re set up, though, they work well enough in Win­dows Mobile for email, SMS and dialing.

Exchange tasks to Remem­ber The Milk

Gmail sup­ports tasks now, but the fea­ture is still in its infancy, and I can’t find any good way to sync them to other devices. So instead, I went with the most pop­u­lar of online task lists, Remem­ber The Milk. This has great inte­gra­tion with other ser­vices like Gmail, iGoogle, Twit­ter and SMS. I could use their MilkSync appli­ca­tion to sync tasks from the web inter­face directly to Win­dows Mobile’s Tasks appli­ca­tion, but since Tasks is gen­er­ally ignored by Touch­Flo 3D on my Touch Pro, it’s just as easy for me to man­age my tasks on the device in Opera through RTM’s mobile inter­face as it would be to keep them in the Tasks appli­ca­tion and dig that up every time.

Live Mesh to Google Docs

Don’t get me wrong, I love the con­cept behind Life Mesh, and it’s still tech­ni­cally a tech­nol­ogy pre­view, not even a beta. I’m sure the issues I’ve been hav­ing with it recently will be ironed out, espe­cially now that Mesh has been moved under Steve Sinofsky’s Win­dows divi­sion (which is on track for their best release ever in Win­dows 7). But for now, it’s just not sta­ble enough and requires way too much CPU, espe­cially on my Win­dows Mobile phone and my net­book. So instead, I’ve uploaded my cur­rent projects to Google Docs. This works well enough on my net­book and desk­top, though I can’t do much offline because Google Gears doesn’t sup­port Fire­fox 3.1b2 yet. It also means I can view, but not edit on my phone because Google Docs doesn’t sup­port that through their web inter­face. I’m still try­ing to come up with a way around this, but all I’ve come up with so far is sav­ing doc­u­ments from Google Docs to my desk­top, then using my phone’s drive mode to copy them to the phone, then reverse the process when I need to get the doc­u­ment from the phone back into Google Docs. Usu­ally this won’t be worth the trou­ble. I might just write new mate­r­ial in an email addressed to my Google Docs address and then copy and paste it where it should be the next time I’m online. Still not ideal, but it should work for the rare times I have to write some­thing on the phone. Writ­ing on the phone itself isn’t as big a deal for me as it used to be now that I carry my net­book every­where I go.

iGoogle or Gmail Labs?

On my phone, I’m access­ing my data pretty much the same way I always have, other than the afore­men­tioned dif­fer­ence with tasks. (Hey, Lla­m­a­graph­ics, any chance of a web-​based LifeBal­ance? You could knock RTM right off the map!) On my Win­dows 7 machines, though, I have more choices. I could keep using Out­look (right!), but even if I opt to go with the web inter­face, it’s still not cut and dried. I could use Gmail for every­thing, or I could use iGoogle, Google’s wid­get dri­ven home­page. Gmail labs offers the abil­ity to insert small side mod­ules for Cal­en­dar, Docs and RTM to the right and left of the mes­sage list, which has every­thing on one page, but pretty tiny, espe­cially on my net­book. It is nicely arranged, though. With iGoogle, I can spread stuff out over mul­ti­ple tabs, change the lay­out at will, and add in other stuff that I can’t do in Gmail. (Also, Gmail is blocked by con­tent fil­ters at the office, but Google isn’t.) I have three tabs set up in iGoogle. Orga­nizer con­tains Gmail, Google Cal­en­dar, Remem­ber The Milk and Weather. Media con­tains Google Docs, Google Reader for my RSS feeds and Google News. Social con­tains wid­gets for Twit­ter, Google Talk (my IM of choice), Face­book and MySpace. If I open these up in sep­a­rate tabs in Fire­fox, that’s pretty much every­thing I need for my daily use.

A method to my madness

And last, an ulte­rior motive. Part of the rea­son I’m tak­ing this oppor­tu­nity to tran­si­tion off Exchange to some­thing a lit­tle more open is to make it eas­ier to move to a Palm Pre when they go on sale in March (yes, I’m stand­ing by that pre­dic­tion), or to an Android-​based vari­ant of the Touch HD. I’m still happy with Win­dows Mobile today, and with a lit­tle third party help and some choice reg­istry tweaks it can be as slick and mod­ern as any other mobile OS (more on that to come), but I’ll state pub­licly that I’m not sure they can over­come the pub­lic per­cep­tion that they’re “old and busted” before such rumor fes­ters into fact. For­tu­nately, cloud com­put­ing offers choices enough to build your own solutions.