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If you're like me - in a technology "mixed marriage" with Windows laptops and desktops running Outlook with Apple mobile devices (iPhone4 and iPad2) but not using Exchange for e-mail, then you've probably been using MobileMe to synchronize your calendar and contact information. At least you were until May 5, 2011, when Apple forced all MobileMe users to go to the new MobileMe calendar, which no longer properly syncs meeting invitations or alerts with Outlook. Fortunately, the timing of the public Office 365 beta (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/online-software.aspx?CR_CC=200039409&WT.srch=1&WT.mc_id=13CBD715-3DF0-4884-90C4-EC231FB3CBBC?CR_SCC=200039409) makes it easy to drop MobileMe and switch to a solution that actually works - really, really well. But, to avoid a lot of blood sweat and tears, there are some steps you need to follow.
Since my specific situation is not well documented on the Office 365 site, I'm hoping that this "to do" list will help avoid some pain and tech support calls for someone else. Here's my scenario before Office 365:
• E-mail and domain hosting at Register.com. (If you want the most amazing service ever with the nicest and smartest tech support people on the planet, I totally recommend using Register.com. Tech support is based in Nova Scotia, Canada.)
• Website hosted at snappages.com. (My web site used to be at Register.com, but the lovely folks at Snappages gave it to me for free. It's simple to maintain and better than Register's current "do it yourself" web site - at least for now. Also really, really nice and friendly folks to help if you have issues.)
• Two Windows 7 64-bit laptops each running Office 2010 32-bit.
• One iPad2 and one iPhone4.
Before the mandatory new MobileMe calendar, I was (more or less) happily using MobileMe to sync contacts and calendars across all of my devices. To sync e-mails, I save "processed" e-mails to offline .pst folders and copy the folders between laptops when I switch between one and the other. I don't care about syncing e-mails that I've already acted on and filed with my phone so if I need access to an historical message, I need my laptop. Since I am only ever using one laptop at a time, this works fine for me. I really need cloud-based syncing for my mobile devices, however, because I'm on the road so often and may or may not have my laptop with me when I make appointments or get contact updates. Here's a list of what I did and what you can do to successfully migrate to Office 365 for e-mail but leave your web site hosted whereever it is currently.
Did you ever take one of those tests where the first step is to read the entire test before doing anything? If you did, you know that the last question says something like "write your name at the top and turn it in." So here's my best advice: read all these steps first and watch the recommended videos and click and read the detailed instructions at all the linked sites.
Things to do to Prepare
1. First things first, sign up for the Office 365 beta - immediately. It can take up to 2 weeks to get your account set up so you'll want to sign up right away. In the meantime, if you've been using MobileMe to sync your "i-devices" with Outlook, it's very likely that two major show stoppers are making your life miserable since the mandatory calendar upgrade.
a. One is that you can't create an alert for an event in Outlook. It's annoying, but the workaround is to create your alerts in MobileMe or on your iPhone and then they will sync to Outlook. Unfortunately, neither of these two devices supports a handy feature in Outlook - the ability to set an alert at "0 minutes," - exactly at the time of the event. The closest you'll get is 5 minutes in advance. Apple claims this is a Microsoft problem - you can only create alerts in your primary calendar and MobileMe now creates its own calendar that Outlook won't let you make your primary calendar. MobileMe used to sync with the default Outlook calendar so I'm not so sure how Apple gets away with this, but it is what it is.
b. The second showstopper is that you can no longer accept meeting invitations and expect them to sync or work correctly across devices. When I was testing with Apple after I upgraded and sensed that something wasn't right, I was not able to correctly accept a meeting invitation in Outlook and generate a response to the sender. There was also some strange behavior when I tried to delete a meeting from my calendar. While the Apple tech support guy was sending me meeting requests from his Mac, I had my daughter in California send me Outlook to Outlook meeting invitations from her Windows PC. Her invites came in to Outlook at the correct local time in both my east coast and her west coast geography. But on my iPhone with the new MobileMe calendar, a 6 pm PT invite that showed up as 9 pm ET on my laptop showed up as 6 pm ET on my phone and then once the cycle of syncing completed, also showed up as a tentative appointment at 6 pm ET on my laptop. Yep, that's right - the same meeting at two different times on all my devices and no really good way to tell which one was correct! I naively asked the Apple tech support dude whether or not they tested the new MobileMe calendar with people who used Outlook but were not using Exchange. His answer: "We knew meetings were going to be a problem. We just didn't really plan on people using MobileMe to sync for work." Seriously, are you kidding?
2. OK, so while you are waiting for your Office 365 beta account, you may want to temporarily use Google Calendar Sync (http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=98563). It's free, works great, and while it doesn't help with contacts, it totally works for calendar items. Unfortunately, there is no free equivalent for contact syncing, which I don't quite understand, but for me, the calendar is much more important and I was willing to live with manual syncing for contacts - at least for a while. The instructions are pretty easy to follow. The minimum synchronization frequency is 10 minutes so updates in Outlook will take a few minutes to get over to your iPhone.
3. Another good thing to do while you are waiting is to do some housecleaning. Archive your old calendar entries (or delete them, if you like). Do a quick pass in your contacts folder and get rid of entries you don't need.
Things to do to set up Office 365 once you get your account
1. When you get our Office 365 account, you will need to follow the instructions to set it up for the first time. Find some time when you've got at least 4 hours where you can work uninterrupted assuming that you are transferring an existing domain and e-mail address. You may not need that long, but just in case, it pays to be prepared. The ideal time would be late in the afternoon on a Friday or on a weekend. Here's why: it takes about 12 hours to fully propagate all the domain information across the internet and you really want to pick a time when you are not going to be getting a lot of email traffic. Before you do anything with Office 365, do the following:
a. I recommend transferring all your e-mail to offline .pst folders. It's a good practice to move "processed" e-mail offline because it keeps your server content smaller (most hosting providers had a mailbox limit) and it makes it easy for you to back up historical information. I organize my e-mail into 6 .pst files in each calendar year and label them YYYY-1Jan-Feb, etc. Within each 2-month file, I group e-mails into folders based on some of the concepts I picked up from The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage your Email Before it Manages You.
b. If you are using Google Calendar Sync, uninstall it to stop syncing your calendar.
c. Then, export your contacts and calendar to a file. (File>Open>Import>Export to a file). I export to a .pst file. I suggest creating one file of contacts and another with your calendar.
d. While you're in there, also export your Rules by selecting File>Manage Rules and Alerts>Options>Export Rules. (You can also export your signatures (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/copy-email-signatures-to-another-computer-HA102545966.aspx) and stationery (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/copy-stationery-to-another-computer-HA102545961.aspx).)
2. If you have your own domain and want to use it with Office 365, you need to associate the domain records with your new Office 365 account. There's a helpful video (http://community.office365.com/en-us/b/office_365_technical_blog/archive/2011/04/15/video-adding-a-registered-domain-name.aspx) that shows you how it will work but the setup process pretty much walks you through it. I recommend watching the video first. The setup process has instructions for 5 or 6 domain hosters, including Register.com and Godaddy.com, so it was pretty straight forward. The Office 365 documentation tells you that you can host just your e-mail with Office 365 without hosting your web site, but they don't really tell you how to do that so this next part is important.
3. Follow the complete instructions to create your CNAME record and DNS records that Office 365 will step you through. If you don't want to also move your web site, you need to log in to the Admin screen of your Office 365 account and create an "A" record to point to your existing web site. For that, you need to know the IP address of the location where your web site is hosted. To create the A record:
a. Log in to Office 365 and select Admin.
b. In the right column, click Domains.
c. Click on your domain name to see the Domain properties..
d. At the top of the screen, click DNS manager.
e. Click New and select A (Address)
f. Enter the host name. In my case I would enter www.windows7newsnewsinfo.com (http://www.windows7newsnewsinfo.com)
g. Enter the "Points to address." If you don't know this, you will need to get this from the place that hosts your web site. I had to do this when I switched my web site hosting from Register.com to Snappages.com so I was able to get the folks at Register.com to walk me through this process and they had the IP address.
4. It may take 12-72 hours for your domain to fully propagate across the internet so while everything is working its way around the world, you can use your old web-based e-mail to check for messages that get routed in to your old account. I was receiving messages on my new Office 365 account within minutes of setting it up but I did find a few messages in my old account the next morning. Since these messages won't sync with your phone or Outlook after you finish the set up, you'll definitely want to check the web version of your old e-mail for a couple days.
5. When the online set up part is done, you can move on to the desktop part. Office 365 wants you to set up Lync 2010 (for instant messaging and desktop sharing). This shouldn't take too long so go ahead and do it first.
6. Then, you need to run the process that sets up your desktop Office 2010 application to work with Office 365. Go ahead and do that but before you open Outlook to finish the process you should create a new Outlook profile. This is recommended by Microsoft but I forgot and didn't do it and I'm pretty sure that it's what caused the synchronization issues I had. (I ended up with most calendar items entered 4 times and most contacts duplicated. It took me forever to clean everything up manually.)
a. To create a new Office profile, go in to Control panel and select Mail. Create a new profile (I called it Outlook1) and then select the button to prompt you select a profile when you open Outlook. After you've got everything working correctly, you can de-select this option so that Outlook will always open to your new profile but while you are still setting everything up, it helps to make it a little easier to get back to your old settings.
b. After you create your new profile, open Outlook and select the new profile. Follow the prompts to enter the information for your new Office 365 Exchange account.
7. You will probably see some e-mail immediately, but until you import your calendar and contacts, you won't have the rest of your information. To import your calendar and contacts, follow the same process that you did to export the files but select Import and select the option to import to the same file in your new Outlook (i.e., Calendar to Calendar, Contacts to Contacts). Depending on how large your files are, this could take a few minutes. Then, you will need to be patient while your information syncs with Office 365. You'll be able to see what's going on in the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, all you can see is that it's synchronizing, it doesn't give you a percentage complete. It took about 30-45 minutes for my calendar to sync (over 3,000 entries) and only about 5-10 minutes for my contacts (about 1500 entries).
8. At this point, you will want to re-create any Inbox folders that you use to route incoming mail (I only have a few so it was easier to re-create them than to try to back up my e-mail.). After that, use the Manage Rules & Alerts feature to import your rules. I then had to re-connect the rules to the appropriate inbox folders, but it only took a few minutes. The best part about doing this is that now that my e-mail is in Exchange, my rules synchronize on both of my laptops and online. This was an unexpected benefit that I'd forgotten about since it's been about 6 years since my e-mail has been Exchange-based. I also had to change the default address book for sending e-mails to my local Contacts folder. This setting is found on the Home menu in Outlook. To change it, select Address Book in the Find tab and then select Tools>Options. Finally, update your signatures and stationery if you use them. (By now, you are beginning to see why I suggest you find a time when you can focus on this process for about 4 hours. It's pretty easy, but it takes some time.)
9. Once you are satisfied that your mail, contacts and calendar have transferred correctly and that there are no duplicates, you can move on to your iPhone and iPad and other devices. (If you get duplicates, switch to a list view and start deleting manually and then check back in calendar view to clean up whatever you missed. I think I got into trouble because I did not start with a brand new Outlook profile. The price I paid was about 3 hours of painstakingly deleting all the duplicate entries).
10. The iPhone and iPad are easy to set up. First, stop syncing with Google calendar if you are using it and delete your old e-mail account. Then, follow the instructions to Set Up Microsoft Exchange E-Mail on an Apple iPhone (http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd125429.aspx).
a. After you follow the instructions, turn on Mail, Contacts, and Calendars.
b. Decide how much mail to sync by selecting an option in the Mail Days to Sync setting.
c. You can specify which Mail Folders to Push as well.
11. One unexpected issue came up with the calendar sync - the calendar entries on my iPhone were now an ugly yellow/orange color. To change the color of your calendar entries on your iPhone or iPad, all you have to do is go to Settings and turn off calendar syncing. Be sure to answer Yes to the question that asks if you want your existing iPhone entries to be deleted. Wait a second and then turn calendar syncing back on. The iPhone cycles calendar colors so just keep doing this process until the color cycles to one you like.
12. Once you've got your first computer and your mobile devices working, you can more on to your other computers. The second one is much easier than the first. Just log in to your Office 365 account on your second computer using your personalized credentials and follow the set up instructions. Once again, you need to create a new Outlook profile on your second computer. Since now all my settings and rules were in the "cloud," I didn't really need to do much to set up my new Outlook profile on my second laptop.
It can take while to get everything working, but now you can be very, very happy. You will finally get all your various devices syncing perfectly and seamlessly - much better than with MobileMe and at a lower cost. Office 365 is free while it's in beta but the small business pricing is $6/user/month - and you get a lot more than just e-mail synchronization for that price. Finally, you've got a solution that allows you to work and play in a gadget "mixed marriage!"