Contactizer Pro, SOHO Organizer , Outlook or.....

[ScottNWDW]

Having used Outlook in the Windows environment for well over a decade I grew accustomed to many of the features of Outlook. Now since I finally have the Mac I am missing a fees things that I loved Outlook for.

One of the main things was that with Outlook you could associate tasks, events, emails with your contacts. You pull up a contacts name and you've got their history in front of you. The emails that were sent to or from you, what tasks they were assigned or associated with and what events they were associated with. You could also create relationships among contacts.

With the native apps on Mac this can't be done. When I got the Mac in March I tried Outlook 2011, but although a nice program, it does not play well with MobileMe and therefore useless since I want it to sync with my iOS devices.

I tried SODO Organizer and it does most things very well. Only problem is that it does have some problems syncing. I ended up with multiple duplicates of almost all my tasks, and many tasks from the past are coming back as not completed.

Contactizer Pro is what I am trying now. Works great, except it does not sync with MobileMe CalDav calendars. It WILL sync one way and creates 1 category (calendar) with ALL the MobileMe calendar dumped into it. Therefore I can't create or modify a calendar item in Contactizer Pro, If I create a calendar item it will sync via MobileMe, but it syncs to a local calendar which iCal uses for the tasks and therefore does not get synced to the other iOS devices.

Any suggestions for other similar programs?

 

[robgendreau]

Boy, you've hit a real weakness with OS X IMHO. The fact you can't have that stuff together is ridiculous. I use Outlook 2011 for this, and yet it doesn't do it as well as the PC version I use at work. Part of the limitation is on our server side, however. With an Exchange Server it works better.

I have used Contactizer and SOHO Organizer as well, and like Organizer the best. And still use it. BUT I'm not currently using the sync function. MobileMe is on it's way out anyway, so I'd be reluctant to rely on a strategy that made use of it unless you're sure it's going to continue. I began to use the accounts capability of Organizer to make a subset of my notes I could use with Dropbox, but Organizer itself uses the OS's built-in contact and calendar databases so this was kind of problematic.

I have taken to using tags to accomplish much of this system-wide, and I think it's ultimately the way to go. The problem is that different applications use different schemes, basically in three groups: openmeta tagging, spotlight tagging, and the photo metadata. SOHO uses spotlight, so a search for the tag "project MacRumor" could bring up contacts, notes, mail, events etc from within SOHO Organizer, even if you were doing an external Spotlight search, but since it's stored in Spotlight it remains on one Mac. Sigh.

Another approach is to use Projects in Things. You can drop events and emails onto Things and it will create to-dos with links to the mail and calendar, and you can arrange these in projects. Works very well for well, projects, but not so hot at just creating a web of contacts to show relationships. And you can store the Things database in Dropbox, which effectively makes it syncable. I do that with MailTags within Mail, and it has the capability of saving emails to the IMAP server WITH the tags. They are also openmeta, and work with applications like Yep, Leap, Tags, Punakea, etc.

Again, however, doing tagging via sync is problematic. So you might also try a more structured approach, a la Organizer, but more customizable. That would be Bento. Syncs with Mac and mobile devices. Accesses the iCal and Address Book databases, but allows you to effectively enter all kinds of info, limited by just your imagination. Can't exactly drop stuff on stuff, but you can do quite a bit. Worth a look.

Good luck. I would have thought this would be a no-brainer by now, but the Mac contact and calendaring applications are basically decades old, and showing it.

Rob