The program installed quickly, without modifying Outlook in any way. It is designed to work with Outlook 2000, XP and 2003.

Upon launching the program, this is what I presented with.

Despite the apparent simplicity, I decided to read the help file anyway. This gave some useful advice.

They recommend one of two methods. Either a direct synchronization over a LAN, or using a Transport file. For my situation , I just want to plug my laptop into the LAN and synchronise the two. But imagine if you have a machine at work you want to synchronise with. From the work machine, you would synchronise to a transport file, kept on say, a zip disk or thumb drive. Then, when you get home, you synchronise your home machine with the transport file. If you use your imagination a little, there are several other ways this could be useful.

I started by sharing the folders with the PST files in, this is usually "C:\Documents And Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook" but I have moved mine to a different location. Then I made a copy of my PST file onto the laptop.

The program has a rather helpful way of making whatever is next in the sequence, flash. After selecting the source and target files, the section box started flashing, so I knew I had to select what to synchronise.

I instantly ran into my first problem. You cannot synchronise while Outlook is open. To be honest, I kind of expected this. Doing so just brought up an error without corrupting anything. So I closed Outlook and tried again.

It very quickly scanned through and updated nothing. But, upon trying to Synchronise the "Sent Items" folder it suddenly started struggling and looked like it was synchronising every item. Unfortunately, synchronising items takes possibly 1 or 2 seconds per item. This is fine if you are synchronising a days worth of e-mails as we are talking 1 or 2 minutes, but when it's a few thousand items, this adds quite a bit of time to the process.

SyncPST remotely sends requests to Outlook to add items so the cause for the delay is Outlook, not SyncPST. But this is the safest way of doing things as it means there is no third party application directly manipulating the PST file - this would concern me.

So I left SyncPST working over night and now it runs every time taking 1 or 2 minutes - even over an 11mb wireless link. This has helped considerably. Sometimes I like to take my laptop into the garden or living room and do some work. Now I close Outlook, synchronise and then go and work somewhere else. I'll be sending and receiving e-mails all day and then when I eventually return to my desktop, I can synchronise these new e-mails in a matter of moments.

On my trips to London, I now check my e-mails using my mobile phone via IR. Then when I get back, onto my desktop they go!

This product is truly excellent and well worth the money. I highly recommend it to anyone who uses Outlook and wants similar functionality. Why not download the trial right now?

Spode

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