Synchronization Software Initial Impressions

I installed the sync software and started to try it out this week. I'm using GooSync to synchronize calendar between Google and Palm (and therefore between Phone and Ecco)so I first tried with the phone book (which GooSync does not handle as well) and data in an outline.

The software syncs well over WiFi with cable and bluetooth options also available. The best thing about the software is that you can go through each data item and decide whether to add to the other (phone vs. Ecco), delete, or merge. This was time consuming, but is better than having data mangled.

Synchronization did have some problems (which I'm hoping might be fixed either thru options I haven't found yet or upgrades to the software). One problem is that the google address book has lots of information from Google+ which doesn't show on the phone but which was detected by the sync software. I went thru each one and selected an option not to synchronize those. It would have been easier if their was some way to filter those out (and maybe there is which I missed). Of course this will only affect people with many contacts on Google+.

The other problem which might affect more was that recognition of duplicates was variable. In some cases if I had the same contact on phone and in Ecco I was given the option of using one or the other or merging. This worked well, giving the ability to decide which data was merged. There was one problem with this process. One contact had large number of notes and the merge screen was too big for my computer screen and I could not see the button to accept the merge. I wound up having to shut down the program and start over, considerably adding to the time of this process. When I came to this person again, I had it just use the Ecco data as opposed to opening the merge screen. This might be a problem for others who have lots of data on phone book contacts in Ecco. It would help if there was an option like on the Palm sync which gave the ability to basic data but no notes on selected people. 

The other problem was that there were multiple entries in which the same contact was in both Ecco an on the phone but the sync program did not recognize this. Wanting to avoid any risk of losing data, in these cases I had them not sync to phone but did have phone sync to Ecco, placing lots of duplicates on Ecco. I'm hoping to manually go thru these and delete the Ecco originals (putting any info in Ecco but not on the phone into the phone data), hoping that after this it will recognize them as a single entry. (Or hopefully there might be an upgrade which is better at automatically recognizing duplicates so I don't have to spend more time on this).

The bottom line is that the sync will work but is not perfect and will take time if you have data on both phone and in Ecco. I suspect this would be much smoother for people who start with all data in either the phone or in Ecco and then use it to start merging the two. I will give the calendar data a try in the future.

I did also try to take data from an outline and transfer it to the notes program which came with the sync program. This was worthless. First you can only select one outline. Secondly, sub data was not transferred to its notes program on the phone.