Friday 17 August 2007

Office Outlook Connector

Most people now have several email accounts spread out around the web, some for personal, some business and whatever else you want to use them for. So having set up a Google account, a Hotmail account and also having a work email it would be nice to have them all linked together right? Well now you can.

Microsoft recently released Office Outlook Connector, this allows users for the first time to recive Hotmail emails through Outlook all you have to do is download the file here. Follow the on screen instructions and you should have Hotmail via Outlook. Then you can add your Google and other mail accounts via the normal Tools --> Email Accounts... route.

So setting this up should be a doddle, but it wasn't the case for me. I validated my version of Office and downloaded the file which pops up asking me if I want to save or open. So I save the file, which is called msnolcon.msi and follow the on screen instructions to install and set up my Hotmail Live account with Outlook. Now all I get in the bottom corner of Outlook is an error symbol and when I click on it, it kindly informs me that there is a connection error and the Outlook Connector is only available to subscribers.

Now I know that this isn't the case, as its all over the place that this service can be used without being a subscriber (paying for hotmail) however you will not be able to sync your calender and tasks, which I have no problem with. So After talking with various other people about the problem I go of on a mission to get it working correctly. I installed it on Vista, XP, Office 2007, Office 2003 and none of these seem to fix the problem.

After a good few hour I go back to try and find some help from Microsoft Download Center and when I get to the help I find a file called "OutlookConnector.exe" so I download this, follow the on screen instructions and ... bam it work!

Now trying to find this file again is a nightmare and I still havn't been able to find it again in the maze that is Microsoft Download Center. The difference between the two downloads is that one of the files are an old version and this is the one that auto downloads. Here are the version numbers:

msnolcon.msi --- Outlook Connector Version 1.8.3501.0

OutlookConnector.exe --- Outlook Connector Version 12.0.4518.1058

Thats a massive difference in versions!!! So just make sure you are downloading the right file if you are having problems with trying to configure the Outlook Connector.

Anyway when I have got this download it works like a treat, I can now use this to download all my emails without having to scour the whole of the web and refreshing alot of different pages.

1 comment:

Alex said...

I do backup every week on my MS Outlook. Last week I did it again and something happened. I didn't understand the reason. But promptly used the Inet and successfully perceived there a feasible solution. It was the tool which should assist in this question not less than me in mine - fix outlook 2000.