Lately I have been working for too many clients at the same time and it is really difficult to manage all your tasks unless you use some kind of a task management tool that integrates well with your email. As I work for a Microsoft Partner, Outlook is my default option........so what is the problem?
My iphone doesnt take advantage of task management in outlook.
IPhone does an amazing job Sync'ing up your emails and calendar items with exchange. But, task management is the one thing that is missing in iphone. I have seen that there are some paid apps that will let you sync your outlook tasks. But, being a developer myself, i hate to pay for these apps. As i have no experience in iPhone sdk, i thought of taking a detour and to write an outlook add-in to some how accomplish this.
The obvious option for me now is to synchronize my outlook tasks with my outlook calendar. But I dont want my calendar to be flooded with the tasks. The out of the box todo bar gives you a really nice view of next five (or any predefined number of) events from your calendar. In my case, i generally have more number of tasks than the number of calendar events per day. So, by integrating these two, my todo bar becomes virtually unusable. After further research, I discovered that you can have multiple outlook calendars and only the default calendar will show up on your todo bar (by default :)).
...............and.........the best part about iPhone exchange integration is that, it will sync all your calendars and not just the default one and it will color code the events to differentiate between different calendars in the consolidated view. So, i can create a secondary calendar through my add-in and store all my tasks in that calendar and let iPhone worry about the synchronization.
I had some time this weekend to actually try this out. So, I wrote a small program and deployed it on my computer and then BING.....all my tasks are now showing up in my iPhone calendar. Not the best solution in the world.....but solves my problem :).
Please note that this is only for Outlook 2007. Currently i dont have a development environment available to develop this for the previous versions of outlook.
[Post edited on 8/1/09]
Download link available here.
Posts
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI realize that this is more of a install at your own risk. Can you tell us if there are any other steps that need to be taken in order to activate the add-in? I have already activated it from within Outlook 2007.
Thanks
Hi Osman,
ReplyDeleteAfter installing the add-in, you dont have to do anything else. Are you not able to see the additional calendar (svTasksCalendar) in outlook? If you can see the calendar, in your iphone, open up calendar app and click 'calendars' button (on top left corner) to see the list of all calendars. If you want to see all the events, select the option 'All'. Let me know if this helps?
Thanks for the reply,
ReplyDeleteNo "svTasksCalendar" displayed in Outlook 2007, and no new calendar was generated in the iPhone. I've uninstalled and re-installed the Add-In but that did not work either. I don't have too many tasks to convert, so I just followed you idea, but did it manually, by creating a separate sub calendar then dragged the tasks into it, and that worked well for me.
Hi Osman,
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like VSTO 2005 SE runtime is not installed on your computer. Can you please verify if you have 'C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\VSTO\8.0\VSTORuntime.dll' file to see if VSTO 2005 is installed or not? Otherwise, you can install this from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=F5539A90-DC41-4792-8EF8-F4DE62FF1E81&displaylang=en. If this is not an issue, can you email send the following registry exports to sampath.vuyyuruNOSPAMgmailDOTcom -
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\TasksToCalendarSync, HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\User Settings\svTools
Thanks for the program
ReplyDeleteWhen the date for a task is over, the task in the calendar dissapear. Is there a way to keep record of past tasks?
Ben