I ran across a pretty cool tool on Download.com the other night and decided to give it a try. It is called OutSync and what it does is it links your Outlook to your Facebook account and allows you to synchronize photos from your Facebook contacts with your Outlook. Why would you want to do that you might ask? Let’s say that you use Outlook for your central contacts database, after all survey’s show that most of us do. I personally migrated to Outlook from Act sometime around 1998 or so and have been extremely loyal to it every since. Most all corporate users I know also have Outlook running all day long to keep their calendars, inbox, and contacts within quick reach, it’s just a productivity thing if you ask me. Let’s say you use Outlook, okay if you have a mobile phone that’s a smartphone or pda phone and you synchronize it with your Outlook, having this tool running will also allow your facebooks contact person to have their photo show up on your phone. I tried it and it works. Although I dont have a lot of my professional contacts connected on facebook, I am sure that one day soon we all will, facebook is just growing that fast.
I did run into a few snags or things that I would have liked to have seen it do differently. For one thing it’s not a live synchronization, would like to see that as a future feature, it also doesn’t handle birthdays, I typically like to call friends on their birthdays, I might not get to talk to them as much as I would like but at least I know that one time a year I get to speak to them on their birthdays, I picked this up from a friend of mine, I always use to be amazed at how well he stayed in touch w/ his contacts. Another feature that I would like to see them add or tweak out is that let’s say John Doe is in my Address Book in Outlook and his facebook profile is for John J Doe, it doesn’t give me the ability to pair those two up as being the same person so I am forced to go in and change my Outlook Contact Data for that person if I want their photo to be synced up. Not a big deal I wouldnt think but let’s say that person is also a part of my Plaxo database, an application I consider to be much more business critical, what does this do for me? Well I have noticed that by changing their name in my contacts database in Outlook, Plaxo, just by nature of the software, will go in and create a duplicate card for that person. That’s my only two drawbacks. The website to get the plugin can be found on CNet’s Download Com here: http://www.download.com/8301-2007_4-9850554-12.html?tag=dlblog-post and the website for getting the app and it’s support, etc., is located here http://www.melsam.com/outsync/default.aspx.
I am always looking for ways to further enhance Outlook and make it work better for me, a couple of other good plugins for Outlook that I recommend are Plaxo (www.plaxo.com), this is by far my favorite. Also, I have a linked in toolbar, you can get that on www.linkedin.com I am pretty sure.
Questions or Comments?