If you use Microsoft Outlook on more than one PC, you’re an unlucky soul. Trying to keep your Outlook e-mail synchronized between more than one computer is an exceedingly difficult task, fraught with potential pitfalls, notably overwriting a new version of your e-mail stored in a .pst file with an older version.
Syncing.net does an excellent job of solving the problem. It automatically synchronizes any changes made to any of your Outlook installations across multiple PCs. Let’s say you use Outlook on a laptop and desktop. When you use it on your laptop, it synchronizes the changes back to your desktop in the background. If your desktop isn’t running at the moment, it performs the synchronization when you turn it back on. The initial file transfer of an entire large folder from one computer to another can take half an hour or more, depending on the size of the folder. After that, though, synchronization rarely takes more than a few minutes. You can choose which Outlook folders you want to synchronize, so that you can synchronize just one or many of them.
Installation may take only minutes, or it may take hours. It depends on the size of your Outlook folders and your Internet connection speed, because Syncing.net needs to copy your Outlook data. You’ll need to pay careful attention during installation to make sure that you set your synchronization options correctly, particularly whether you want to combine the Outlook folders of the two PCs into one folder, or else create new folders. Once you do that, though, you’ll be all set, and your Outlook data will automatically synchronize in the background.
The software is pricey at $150 for use by one person on three PCs for home use or for very small businesses. Larger businesses can pay on a per PC basis for more powerful versions of the software suited for business use–either $119 per PC or $199 per PC depending on the number of Outlook folders that need to be synchronized, the number of PCs per Outlook group, and other similar features.
But if you need to use Outlook on more than one PC regularly, you’ll find Syncing.net is well worth the price.
Note: This file is for the Professional edition, which is the only download available. The vendor asserts that it is possible to register and downgrade to Home in the same install, with a few caveats. To downgrade from Professional to Home, a user either must either not exceed the Home Edition limitations, or must pare down Groups to 100 or fewerOutlook folders and Sync Folders to five or fewer.
–Preston Gralla