Sent to Angharad last week:
It took me this long to figure out how to add you to my Microsoft Outlook address book.
First, I was against the idea of retyping all the addresses that I had already entered into my computer. So I looked for a way to sync between the Apple Address Book application and the Exchange Server here at the office.
It turns out that if you have Entourage, Microsoft’s Mac email client, it can import Address Book entries. I own it, and that seemed to work OK. Entourage can then be made to sync with Exchange, when a service pack from earlier this year is applied to it [Entourage]. I applied the service pack, set up the various configuration variables, and gave it a whirl.
Nothing.
I fiddled around with the variables, but it still couldn’t connect. I even asked our IT people here, who finally told me why it wouldn’t work: our Exchange server is inside the corporate firewall. I had thought this might be the case, but didn’t want to admit it. A firewall means that I a, doomed to use Exchange Web Access, which is slow, buggy, and prompts me for my password every 30 seconds–to access my Heritage email account from outside of the office.
Then, last week, I downloaded a new patch to upgrade my system software to, officially, OS X v. 10.3.2.1 (really!). Actually, my computer upgraded itself automatically. Whatever. Anyway, though undocumented, it turns out that the new version of Address Book included in this update will sync through MS Exchange Web Access. Of course, this is a horrible idea (if Microsoft were to change the HTML, for example, the ability to sync would break), but, I thought, I would be happy to sync my address book, which is quite large, just once. After that, I thought, I could keep things up-to-date manually.
So I entered my login information (which, oddly, you do in Address Book, though you affect the actual synchronization in iSync. Why? I have no idea.) and suddenly…or not so suddenly, actually…it didn’t work.
Over the course of 15 minutes of fiddling around, I realized that iSync needed both my canonical Outlook name and my Heritage network login. This first value was to be passed as my “username,” and this second as part of the URL of the Exchange server.
Don’t even ask how anyone else would ever figure this out. I’m not even sure by what chain of logic I arrived at it.
So, anyway, it worked. Kind of.
All the addresses made it into my Web Access address book. When I got to work on Friday, though, none appeared to be in the “contacts” section of Outlook’s “Address Book.” Well, I figured that out today. The contacts had in fact been imported into what Outlook calls my “Contacts” box. Each contact is composed of a number of key:value pairs (like Name: Joe Blow), one of which, unsurprisingly, is “E-Mail:xxx@yyy.com”. For reasons I don’t understand, all of the addresses I imported had blank “E-Mail” fields; the actual addresses were stored in the “E-Mail2″ field, which Outlook allows you to read and edit, but not to use when composing emails.
So, a bit of copy-paste later (a lot later…15 seconds X 300 addresses = over an hour) and I can now type “angh” into the “To:” field of an email and it gets to you (probably).
Brilliant. What a wonderful time-saving contraption!
It could have been worse/less intuitive/more time consuming, I guess. Not sure how, though.