The Outlook & Sync blog

When answering customer e-mails it’s often helpful to quote URLs for more information. To avoid typos, you can use ReplyButler’s text module engine to store them nicely in menus.

And now comes the interesting part: If your website is multi-language, you can store multiple URLs (pointing to the same page, but in different languages) in the same text module. It’s still just one text module. Just one item that you have to click on. But ReplyButler knows that there’s more than one URL and will use the URL that you have entered for the language that was used in the current e-mail.

Automatically.

More info: ReplyButler.com

One of the many small features that Easy2Sync for Files has is that it supports you when searching for the right folder. The folder where your browser stores your bookmarks, for example.

Simply create a new task in Easy2Sync and instead of entering a folder, click on the small black triangle on the right. The combo box will open and present you (among other things) a choice of your browser bookmarks. Simply choose yours and repeat this for the second computer. This works with the Freeware Edition for the browsers Opera and Firefox. (IE users will need the Home or Business Edition because of the subfolders.)

Both Easy2Sync for Files and Easy2Sync for Outlook offer the option to summarize multiple tasks (via file > new) into a “task collection”. This is very useful if you wan to synchronize multiple folder trees or PST files in a row. Furthermore you can (via the menu ‘View’) hide all tasks from the main list that are already member of a task collection. This makes the list shorter and easier to read.

Only downside: Sometimes you want to run just a single task of the task collection. But you can’t do that if the task is hidden.

The trick here is very simple and very useful: Use the right mouse button to click on the task. The context menu contains not only the usual commands (like ‘Edit’), but also all tasks that are a member of that task collection. Now one click is enough to run the specified sync task.

More info: Easy2Sync for Files, Easy2Sync for Outlook

If you ever have a problem with your PST file (like strange errors in Outlook or messages about a ‘corrupted’ PST file), you can use Microsoft’s ScanPST to fix the problem.

There’s a tutorial at Petri on repairing the PST file with the all details, because it can be quite tricky to find and use the ScanPST.

When you’re working a lot with Microsoft Word and other programs, you may want to keep Word open all the time. Instead of closing, it would be nice if the program was minimized to the tray.

Well, you can do that with our program TheBest Minimize to Tray. SImply start Word, start our Tray software and create a new exception. Just tell the program that any application named “Word” shouldn’t be closed when you click on the X button, but minimized into the tray.

Easy. Give it a tr(a)y and minimize Word into the tray.

We’ve released the Pro Trial of our Logo Design Software “Company Logo Designer”. This trial version makes it even easier for your to design your perfect logo. In contrast to the 50 templates of the normal trial it includes the 200 logos of the free logo packs PLUS another 200 logo templates that are normally only included in the Comfort Edition.

Company Logo Designer

Start designing your logo!

Outlook has a built-in feature to move old e-mails to a file named archive.pst. (Which can be synchronized with Easy2Sync, too, by the way.) If that feature isn’t good enough for you, you can use Easy2Sync for Outlook to replace it.

For this, Easy2Sync supplies a task type move e-mails instead of synchronizing them:

So where’s the trick?

Now you can use Easy2Sync’s filter mechanims. You can exclude objects by “private” flag, move them only if they belong to a certain category or specify different age boundaries for contacts, e-mails or calendar items.

For a complete set of the filters have a look at Easy2Sync for Outlook.

One of the new features in the latest Easy2Sync for Outlook release is rather small, but very useful. You can tell the program not to close, but to minimize into the tray when you press the X-Button. You can enable it here:

This protects you against closing the program accidentally, if you want to keep it open for an automatic sync. If you want to give it a try, check out our Outlook sync program.

If you’re into Geocaching, you can use our free software GoogleEarthTweaker to convert GPX files and make them display nicely in GoogleEarth.

You can also use this program to exclude found caches. This may be useful if you have a lot of GPX files that you don’t want to update all of the time, but still want to remove your latest finds from them.

Simply activate the “exclude” checkbox and use the button [...] to specify a folder where the GPX file with your finds resides. (Note: It can still be zipped, GoogleEarthTweaker won’t mind.)

Please use this link to Download GoogleEarthTweaker.

Synchronzing two calendars is a feature, that’s Easy2Sync for Outlook can do since ages. But the new version 1.26 offers a new twist:

Copy-merging.

Now what’s that?

It almost like synchronizing. Any item that exists on both sides and is changed on either, is updated on the respective other side. The new this: If the item is new, it gets only copied if its new on the “master” side (the source side for the arrow).

Too abstract? Two examples:
1. 20 people in you company have 20 calendars. Simply synchronzing them would create havok, each calendar would contain all items from everybody, you couldn’t find anything. With the new copy-merge mode, you can create a 21st calendar and copy-merge all calendars into the new one. The 20 calendars stay the same but now you have a “team calendar” that contains all items from all calendars. And the best part: If you change an item in the “team calendar” it will get synchronized back to owning calendar *only*.
2. You can 12.000 contacts in Outlook. You PDA would detonate if you tried to synchronize it with that. Just create a calendar with your “favorite contacts”. You can now use your PDA software (sorry, not Easy2Sync) to synchronize your PDA with the favorite contacts folder. And you can use Easy2Sync for Outlook to copy-merge the favorite with the main contact folder. It will synchronize changed items in both directions. But it will not add items from them main to the favorites folder.

Hope you get what I mean. Want more info on Easy2Sync for Outlook and team calendars? Give Easy2Sync a try!

Synchronizing Outlook over the network is always the faster and easier option – but it’s not always available. For example if you want to synchronize your Outlook calendar at home and at the office. You still can synchronize them. And here’s how to:

1. Get an USB-Stick. It doesn’t have to be big. Any stick that you can buy nowadays is likely to be big enough to hold your calendar. SD-Cards & co work, too.
2. Get Easy2Sync for Outlook (this requires the Business Edition). You’ll need it on both computers.
3. Use Outlook to create a blank PST file on the USB-Stick (Outlook: File > New > Outlook data file) and create an empty contacts folder in it.
4. Close the file in Outlook again. (Right-click the root item of the new file in the Outlook folder tree)
5. Start Easy2Sync for Outlook, click on the “New” button and choose the Calendar sync. Just follow the wizard’s steps.
6. Repeat (5) on the other PC, with the stick plugged in there.
7. If you want, edit the tasks to exclude private contacts from the sync.

That’s all! Want more info on Easy2Sync for Outlook? Click here!

Originally Easy2Sync for Files was “just” able to synchronize files. By now it has outgrown that small island and has become a feature continent. You can synchronize, copy, move and do lots of other things with your files. Simply create a new task and choose one of the “move” task types:

Yes, there’s more than one because you can decide if you want to keep the directory structure or move that, too. Perfect for doing a backup of your files! Try Easy2Sync for Files!

One might argue if collecting stamps is a useful hobby. Collecting tasks however can be VERY useful. Both Easy2Sync for Outlook and Easy2Sync for Files feature something called “task collection” in the “new” menu:

Task collections are special tasks that group several other synchronization tasks. Once the task collection is run (manually or automatically), it starts all the files in the collections. For example, I have a task collection “Backup” that runs all the different backup tasks that I use to back up different parts and projects of my harddisk to a removable medium. One click, one coffee and I can sleep better.

BTW: This feature can be combined with a menu item of the “view” menu. It allows you to hide all the sync jobs that are member of a task collection from the main dialog. A great feature if you have so many sync jobs that it already messes up the main dialog, as it reduces the many synchronization jobs to a few task collections.

Another BTW: You can easily recognize the task collections in the main dialog, as they don’t have an icon to indicate their task type (sync, copy, etc.). Since they can icorporate many task types (sync AND copy) it doesn’t make much sense to display an icon.
If you want you can test the Freeware Edition here.

Opera is a great (free) browser. If you like it, too, you may want to synchronize your bookmarks between different computers. Since Opera stores all bookmarks in a single file, you can easily synchronize that with the Freeware Edition of Easy2Sync for Files. Forever, if you like, as the Freeware Edition doesn’t contian a time limit.

Easy2Sync has a special assistant for task that synchronize just one file:

By default Opera’s bookmark file is named opera6.adr and is stored in C:\Program files\Opera\Profile (even though the path may be different on your system). To set up the task just drag the file from the local and the (shared) remote path into this dialog. When synchronzing, please note that Opera modifies the file every time you use a bookmark, so it’s best to synchronize often.

Give it a try with our Freeware Edition of Easy2Sync for Files.

Easy2Sync for Files offers plenty of configuration options. And if you’re the tech guy who did the job of configuration it for somebody else you may want to protect your work against accidental misconfiguration by the user.

This can be done easily with Easy2Sync. You can protect the tasks (which contain the file sync information), the options, the service configuration, the start of the sync software or of a sync task. Well, practically everything. And you can display an information message (like “don’t do this yourself, call us instead”) and / or demand a password.

Want to have a test drive? Then try our Freeware Edition. It fully supports the passwords feature.