I have some experiences with outlook. about a year ago I tried the
ical4OL plugin, it actually worked pretty good, but it was painful to
set up and the end users didn't like it, so they ended up rolling back
out of it.
I recently set up a person with a new calendar using the bynari plugin.
outlook frequently complains about the plugin slowing it down and
tries to disable it, but otherwise it is working reliably.
I also had an office of 12 computers recently I migrated from
outlook/exchange. All the staff were happy to move to thunderbird, but
the boss there really wanted to keep using outlook because he had around
20 years of mail/calendar/contacts in it (diehard outlook user). moving
the staff to thunderbird wasn't too bad, I exported all calendars from
outlook as ics files and imported them in thuderbird. On several of
them I had to use iconv(? I think it was) to identify non-utf-8 lines,
and on most of them I had to manually delete a handful of events from
the ics file, without that most of the calendars duplicated themselves
at every refresh, but once done they worked, and continue to work, reliably.
for the one outlook user in that office, I spent a little to a lot of
time every day for weeks trying to get it working right. I tried so
many ways of exporting/importing/copying/manipulating I couldn't even
begin to list them. Importing directly through bynari wasn't the worst
of the things I tried, but it was also far from the best. I tried to
copy directly from the exchange calendar, import/export through ics,
probably a few other things. Bynari always found a handful of events to
choke on no matter what I did and had a very bad habit of causing
duplications. The best results I got were still by importing through
thunderbird to get the events loaded on the davical and then hooking
bynari to it afterwards, but after some days something would always blow
up, usually by duplicating events at every sync till it was flooding the
internet connection.
One thing about bynari is that they only offer email support on the
plugin, and it usually took them a full day to answer an email. So a
mail that went back and forth a couple times took a week to get through,
so they were essentially useless in offering any meaningful assistance.
And as painful as the calendars were for this user, address book was way
worse. Though the problem existed in both, it was much more obvious in
the contacts than in the calendar, but one of the base problems was the
dictionary/language of the text; for example, if I copied an E with an
accent aigu out of outlook, it would often paste as a japanese character
in excel or whatever program, and deleting that character would clear
that problem. But so much of his data had stupid little quirks like
that that removing them all would have removed at least 60% of his data.
However, this said, I got about 85-90% of his ~3000 contacts migrated
if I exported from outlook as csv, imported to thunderbird local address
book, exported that as a vcf file using a plugin called thundersync,
then importing them in myroundcubes carddav plugin, and removing the bad
contacts by hand when it choked. that got everything working, but
bynari still always found one (and only one) contact to throw an error
on, even though it still worked, but remove that contact it would pick
another; remove that one and it would pick another, and so on.
The solution in the end for this users was to use google
calendar/contacts. There were still some problems there, and doesn't
function with the rest of the office, but for the most part everything
just worked and he is happy. Presumably that means the same could be
made to happen in Davical, but it ended up being beyond my skill set (or
persistence level) to make it happen...
So based on my experience, I would recommend bynari for new calendars,
or calendars with few enough events that they can be manipulated, or
possibly re-entered, by hand, but I would not recommend it for anything
that is already large, nor would I lightly agree to take on the task of
migrating another user like him again...
If you have better luck, or find a better way, I am interested to hear
about it...
On 15-03-22 07:34 AM, Egoitz Aurrekoetxea wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I ask this question in case you know what’s the most proper way of doing this procedure. I explain, I see lots of cases where a customer has been using an Outlook
> calendar for years. Now he/she decides to sync it with Davical with some Outlook addon like Bynari or Surgate. Perhaps the most proper way of doing this process
> directly just configuring the addon and syncing could perhaps be to export to ics, import with a CalDAV client (not the Outlook add ons said before) and later with a
> new pst for instance to sync the server’s content with a fresh pst and this Outlook add ons?.
>
> How do you usually do this?. I don’t like Outlook but have lots of customers running it and without the option of using another thing and was wondering what could
> be the most appropriate way of achieving this process because perhaps it’s better not to sync directly.
>
> Another question, if you have heard or use Outlook what is the most appropriate / stable addon for using?.
>
> Best regards,
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