Migrating Contacts from Outlook/Exchange server to OS X Address Book via MobileMe

For the past year I've had one set of Contacts in Outlook/Exchange server and another set in OS X Address Book/MobileMe. My iPhone pulled in both sets, so they met there. (I'll omit the added complexity of how I sync to Google.)

This worked quite well, but now I need to bring all my Contacts into OS X Address Book. There are several ways to do this [1], but in the midst of some quick Google searches I remembered I'd written about this. I like my approach best, as detailed in two 2009 posts (neither of which rank highly on Google fwiw [2]):

• Gordon's Tech: Project Contacts: Now mixing Outlook/Exchange, PST file, Outlook/Home, MobileMe Sync, OS X Address Book and the iPhone (5/2009)
• Gordon's Tech: MobileMe: Integrating Work and Personal Contacts (11/2009)

The value of this approach is it uses Apple's own software to manage the Outlook to Address Book translation. The problem is that it requires MobileMe, which is no longer publicly available. I'm hoping Apple will do something similar with iCloud -- assuming they don't shut Windows out entirely.

The software I use is the Contact Sync tool built into MobileMe for Windows. These are the components:

1. MobileMe (alas, closed to new users ... maybe iCloud will work one day?)
2. Outlook 2007 running on XP (in my case, in a VM)
3. MobileMe Control Panel for Windows (no support for Outlook/Exchange, only Outlook standalone)
4. OS Address Book.

The first step is to get a copy of my Contacts into Outlook 2007 at home.

1. Clean out all Contacts from Outlook 2007.
2. Using MobileMe control panel and "sync reset" I sync everything from MobileMe into Outlook 2007.

Second step is to copy my Contacts from Exchange Server to a PST file. This has the added benefit of transforming X400 style email addresses to standard format.

Third step is ...

1. Back up OS X Address Book contacts.
2. Add the PST file as a data file and drag and drop Contacts into a subfolder of Contacts (see above articles for details, this is how Apple's sync software treats OS X Address Book Groups -- as Contacts subfolders).
3. Sync again to get them all to MobileMe and inspect MobileMe.
4. In OS X sync to get them all to Address Book.

I'm reminded of something I'd forgotten -- how vastly better Outlook is for managing contacts than OS X Address Book -- especially since Microsoft Access can manipulate Outlook contacts. It's reason alone to have my VM keep synchronizing with MobileMe.

[1] CSV export doesn't work very well. There are some utilities that probably work; one reader of mine had success using Plaxo.
[2] A splog that had stolen a post of mine ranked higher than my stuff. Maybe I should start taking Google's ads?

Lost and found: putting contact info on iOS and OS X login screens

Most people are reasonably honest, and for some integrity is a point of pride.

So if you lose your iOS or OS X device there's a good chance it will be found by an honest person. Alas, at that point they're stuck. They have no way to know who to return the device to, especially if it's encrypted (as it should be).

It's easy to remedy this for an iOS device. You can make any image the background for the iOS login screen. I typed my contact info into an iOS Note, saved it as a screenshot, then made it my login background. For good measure I taped a business card into the back of my Speck iPhone case.

Things aren't as easy for OS X, including Lion. There's no tool for changing the login screen background, you have to hack it. On an Air, you can't even tape a business card or write contact info on the battery. (Yes, you could try a Sharpie on the back. That takes a Vulcan dedication to logic!).

For my Air I put my contact info into the password "hint" box. If someone clicks on the question mark next to my name on the login screen they'll see it. This is subtle though, so I'll probably hack the login screen too, and use a pixel editor to put my contact info there too. I did something like this once with a digital camera.

Apple should make it easier for honest people to help us out ...

Update: Yay! There's an official way to do this in Lion. KimH had the tip in comments. I'm starting to like Lion a bit more ...

Gmail and Google Contact Groups: At last, simple paste of a list of email addresses

I've not seen mention of this, but for me it's the biggest improvement to Gmail/Google Contacts in months. Heck, it may be the most valuable thing Google has done for me in 2011.

Years ago, when Gmail was definitely beta, we could create email "lists" (Groups) by pasting a list of email addresses into a text field. Gmail would digest the list and create a Group. Google removed this functionality, perhaps to reduce abuse by spammers. Instead we had to create Groups one member at a time. This was a serious PITA for the various sports teams and organizations I work with.

I gave up hope that Google would ever restore this functionality, but today I discovered they have -- probably in the past few weeks.

It's subtle, but the UI for creating a Group, or adding email addresses to a group, is now an expandable multi-line text box. If you paste in a list of email addresses Google will match them to existing Contacts and add the Contacts to the Group. Failed matches become new email-address-only members.

My Lion bugs - collection

I'll be using this post to collect the Lion (OS X 10.7) bugs I run into, and track which are fixed. I think Lion will ready for general use by summer 2012.

1. Not a new bug -- but Lion Parental Control log display, like all prior versions of OS X, truncates the visited or blocked site descriptions.
2. You can't create a guest account on a FileVault 2 encrypted disk. The option to do this is grayed out. If you are careful you can rest a mouse pointer on the checkbox and get an explanatory text. This makes sense, but the bug is a failure to notify the user; the UI doesn't work.
3. There are problems with security and privilege escalation when users do administrative tasks from non-admin account. I think these will take a while to fix. They probably play a role with these bugs; I use a non-admin account most of the time.
1. Printers shared by 10.6 machine are not visible to Lion machines. I was able to get the printer to show up by applying a pending 10.6 update and restarting both the print server and my Lion (Air) client. I have a hunch this is somehow related to the 'download from internet' bug (see below) and at root it's a security bug.
2. Lion does not remember 'download from internet' 'do you want to open' choices. It can persist is asking them.

File these under criminally negligent design rather than mere bugs ...

1. iCal
2. Address Book

OS X: Firewire 400 networking faster than Gb ethernet

I've idly wondered about this and today I had a real world test.

I am copying a 64GB VM image between machines.

I knew it wouldn't work, but for fun I tried 802.11n. That was estimated to take days.

Then I tried Gb ethernet. OS X estimated 6 hours.

Then I tried firewire 400. It's little known, but 10.6 and earlier supported networking using Firewire (probably using Bonjour/Rendezvous discovery). Both machines assigned the one another an IP address and they connected (there was a little pizza spinning because I forgot to dismount a network share first).

The transfer was initially estimated to take 5 hours. Now it looks like it will complete in 30 minutes.

So it appears that OS X Firewire networking is much faster than Gb ethernet, which one wouldn't guess from the specs (Gb > 400 Mb). On the other hand, the firewire estimate started out as 5 hours and then suddenly sped up, so there's something quirky here.

Incidentally, doing firewire networking makes the laptop run hot. It's working ...

Shrinking a pre-allocated Mac VMWare Fusion virtual machine image

My "pre-allocated" VMWare image was taking up 120 GB on my drive for about 40GB of data. I found many references on how to shrink these images (.vmdsk), but they were largely obsolete and misleading. It takes a while, and the steps are weird, but it's fully supported by VMWare 3.

At a high level, here are the steps. Alas, I'm short of time so no details.

1. Close down the guest OS.
2. Using VMWare settings for 'hard drive' you can change the image from pre-allocated to the default. This takes hours but it works.
3. Open the guest OS and run XP defrag.
4. In the guest OS update VMWare tools.
5. In the guest OS Run VMWare tools "shrink". Takes hours.
6. In the guest OS Defrag again as a nice-to-do.
7. Shut down and restart to make it all nice and clean.

My image now consumes about 45 GB of drive space. It's not pre-allocated, so it will get host OS fragmented as it grows but I can live with that.

Strangest sync error ever - Google Calendar

This is very strange.

I use Google Calendar Sync to sync an Outlook/Exchange calendar to Google Calendar.

On that machine I authenticate with two Google accounts, one has two factor authentication.

It looks like Google Calendar Sync is posting transactions to both accounts even though it has only one account's password.

At least, that's the best explanation I have so far.

Again - one of the weirdest things I've seen in a while, even allowing that sync is fraught with weird errors.