Re: [MLO] One-way sync of Outlook tasks to MLO

[Lisa Stroyan]

That's odd. Have you played with "Conflict Resolution" settings? They shouldn't be coming into play though. You might have hit a bug.

On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 8:19 AM, Thomas Backhaus <thomas....@googlemail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I'm using MLO 4.0.0 and Outlook 2010, still a new user to MLO. What I want to do should be rather straight forward (I thought): While browsing and sorting my mails in outlook I generate new tasks that I simply collect without further ado in Outlook. After cleaning up the mess (aka my inbox), I then jump into MLO, sort the tasks, give them deadlines, contexts etc.

Then I delete all tasks in Outlook, in order to collect them solely in MLO, together with their meta-information. I don't like my tasks popping up in different programs.

Problem: At the next sync MLO deletes all the tasks that it can't find in Outlook any more. I thought that the "Outlook -> MLO (Copy Outlook Tasks to MLO)" would be doing just that, i.e. take all tasks in outlook, copy them to MLO, end of story. However, MLO is obviously also checking whether the MLO tasks still exist in Outlook and, if not, also deletes them in MLO.

Any thoughts, recommendations? Beginner's mistake?

Thomas

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Lisa Stroyan, mailto: lstr...@gmail.com

[Thomas Backhaus]

Nope, haven't touched the "conflict resolution" settings - or any
other settings, for that matter...

Thomas

> ------------------------------
> Lisa Stroyan, mailto: lstro...@gmail.com <lstro...@gmail.com>

[m...@grantsmiths.org]

Hi, Thomas. I'm not sure if this will help you or not. I have a fairly
similar process but I don't use outlook sync. While reviewing my emails I
set the followup flag on each item that requires a task. When I'm done I
click the flag in my inbox header to get a view grouped by flag setting.
Then I select all flagged emails and drag them to an MLO window displaying
the inbox, where I drop them. Then I flip back to Outlook and hit "delete."

The task created in MLO has the email subject as its title and the email
body as the note. At the top of the note there's a link that you can click
to bring up a view of the original email message (as long as you have not
emptied MLO's trash. There are no subsequent syncs of any kind so the new
tasks stay put until you are done with them.
-Dwight

[James D]

After fighting with MLO Outlook sync and not being able to get it working properly, I am adopting Dwight's workaround.

For whatever reason, the MLO and Outlook sync simply don't reliably support the following use case:

I want to mark emails in my company's email system as tasks, and have them automatically sent from Outlook to MLO, where I manage the task execution.  If possible, I would like the tasks completed in MLO to be either deleted in Outlook or marked as complete there.

It seems I have tried every possible combination of the Outlook sync parameters.  There is no combination that does this.  (I am still stuck on Outlook 2007 in my company, but I doubt if 2010 or later changes this MLO behavior)

Among other approaches I tried, I was using the approach of assigning Outlook tasks a category of "MLO" to limit the tasks I wanted to sync from Outlook to MLO.

The following very unacceptable outcomes result:

- The Outlook root task, "<OutlookTasks>" in my setup, gets created, and my existing MLO tasks get completely rearranged and stuck under the <OutlookTasks> folder in seemingly random fashion.

- When I try to sync Outlook -> MLO, my active MLO tasks all get shot up to Outlook as tasks; not at all what I want; I don't want to manage *anything* in that clunky Outlook monstrosity.  I only want to use Outlook as a source of a few selected tasks, based on incoming email, and send those email-derived tasks to MLO.

- If I delete, in Outlook, the MLO-sourced tasks that wound up showing up in Outlook after a sync, on the next sync, the tasks I deleted in Outlook get deleted from MLO, seemingly no matter what settings I use.

It may be possible, by defining a to-do view in MLO to limit the tasks, to get better behavior.  Possibly allowing the Outlook settings to default to mentioning the "Active Actions" view is the source of the problem.  However...

My conclusion:  The behavior of MLO Outlook sync, with the use case I am trying to do, is seemingly random, unpredictable, and uniformly bad, destroying and scrambling my tasks around.  For whatever reason, MLO simply doesn't reliably support this way of operating.  It shouldn't be this hard to get a simple, common approach to work, and I've already spent way too much time on it compared to the limited benefits.  Thus I've chosen to STOP trying to get MLO Outlook sync to work, and to just use the workaround Dwight mentioned.  It seems to work fine to just select the tasks you want in Outlook, and drag-and-drop them into the MLO Inbox, and to NOT use MLO Outlook sync at all.

James

On Wednesday, May 22, 2013 12:38:39 PM UTC-7, Thomas Backhaus wrote:

Hi Dwight,

thanks, that sound like a nice work-around. If I indeed stumbled on a bug and there's currently no way of correcting for it, I'll definitely give it a go!

Thomas