mavSolve

So, my final complaint with working in the “cloud” is contact management.   I was very excited this week to discover that Google Sync for Blackberry had added the capability to syncronize not only my calendar, but also my contacts.  Woo Hoo!!! Finally, all my email addresses and phone numbers TRULY in one place.  Oh man.  I’ve been through hours and hours of recovering from that adventure.  So, this is how it went:

First, I thought, well… I’m going to sync my blackberry with my mac (Address Book) application one last time.  Then, I will check the box on my Blackberry to sync with Google, and I should get merged results, right?  Well, merged is right.  I got double the contacts.  Nothing was easily recognizable.  OK… so, no big deal.  On to the second plan.

So, I back up the Address Book and then I do a sync: Blackberry to Address Book.   Oh cool, now I can just clean these up in (Easy to use) Address Book, sync back to the Blackberry, and the Blackberry will sync up to gmail Contacts.  I’m going to be in Fat City here pretty soon.  OK.. Clean them up… delete/merge/validate the duplicates…. but wait…. Huh?  Howcome the company names are now in the first and last name fields.  Wait, Google contacts doesn’t have first and last name fields… Oh well, that I can live with.  Push on through, because you are about to hit the jackpot; find the grail.  You are going to have OTA (Over the Air) synchronization of your contacts.   You are asking:  “Jim, did it work?”  Let me just begin to describe the quagmire this created.  For some contacts, I now had three records.   For others, none.  Of course, during the clean up process, I had updated some email addresses (quite a lot of them) and phone numbers.  Now, I had a back-up, but it would only really give me state as of two days ago.   I had modified lots of records.  So, go back to the archive, or try to push through.   Only about 300 real contacts (even though I now had over 500 in my address books), so I should be able to make it right.  I decide to push on.

How did that go?   Well, not so swell (ly).   I spent hours and hours pouring over the records.  I used AtoG (a free/share ware application) To export my Address Book Contacts to gmail.  I used the gmail export tool to export contacts (With newly added and fresh “?” around names… I really liked those).   I used text Wrangler to inspect the text files before importing them.   I went back and forth about 15 times.  Meanwhile, my Blackberry was toast.  I now had orphaned address records which I could not delete, nor merge with any other records.  Missing Sync for the Blackberry, while a great tool, was no help at all.

Finally, I cleaned my Blackberry. (There is a little known button you can push which “wipes the handheld”).   Now, if I used regular Blackberry email, I’d probably never feel comfortable doing that, but since I use the gmail client, no problem.  I don’t actually store anything on my Blackberry.  So, WIPE THE HANDHELD, we did.   Clean slate there.  Now … what about my contacts?  OF COURSE I went back to the backup and started over.   I was able to completely delete all of my contacts in gmail.   (This is also a recent addition, as you used to only be able to do 20 at a time.)   So, restore contacts from Address Book backup, then figure out what changed.  So, I finally exported from gmail Contacts to vCard (Address Book) format, and did an import, only I chose to keep all duplicates.  I then went through and deleted and merged (manually) until I felt comfortable that I had recovered and repaired everything essential.   Next, I used AtoG again to export my Address Book to gmail, and Missing Sync to Sync my Blackberry.  Whew… 17 hours later…. back in business.

So, where am I now?   Well, right back where I started.  I use Address Book as my contact manager.  I find it lacking in a lot of ways, but feel it is still the best alternative.  I was so excited to see Google taking some time to make the contact manager a viable application.   But, it still isnt’ ready for prime time.  I’m not sure why contact management is so much more complex than calendar synchronization, but, it appears that it is.  So, for now… back to the old ways.

PostScript: 1/6/09

It is with great pleasure that I tell you: I’m currently using google contacts and my blackberry and syncing OTA (over the air).   I no longer plug my berry into anything, and my calendar and contacts are both synchronized with my google calendar.  (on my own domain, no less).   I did have to give up a couple of things, however.

1. I had to give up the idea of having someone’s picture pop up on my berry when they called.  The picture sync doesn’t work well OTA just yet.
2. I had to completely abandon the apple address book.   While it is an elegant tool in many ways, the three way sync is just not realistic.  Google’s contact interface leaves something to be desired, but it is adequate for my needs now, and I’m sure it will get better with time.