Transferring Palm Desktop Calendar and Contacts Data

Palm Pilots.  

There's nostalgia for you.  

But apparently the data can live on in their Desktop app.

The New York Times had an article on Transferring Old Palm Desktop Data (to Outlook) that is worth having around in case you find yourself in that situation.

Needless to say this is client-to-client.

Smartphones and your calendar server migration

We go over this a lot with folks and it's worth blogging about.

Let's say you're switching your calendar server and you've got BlackBerrys, Smartphones, ancient PDAs, whatever connected to your old server. And you want to use the same product when you're done in your NEW environment (let's call it Exchange).

Our recommendation is that as part of your migration process you blank out your calendars in your source system and re-synch completely on your target.

Why? Because the synch usually keeps track based on something called UIDs (or Universal Identification Numbers). You change your calendar server, you change your UIDs, and if you're not careful your Smartphone will get data from BOTH systems (and this is a hassle).

While migration is going on we strongly recommend turning off your BlackBerry server. Why? Sumatra generates a lot of email as part of re-creating end-user calendars in Outlook. While Sumatra’s insertion technology removes almost all of that email from end user’s in boxes, it can not remove those messages delivered to your device via the BlackBerry Exchange Server. So depending on your migration option your BlackBerry users will either be flooded with a lot of email (no EventSink) or some email (EventSink).

Since your BlackBerrys, Palms, or WindowsMobile PCs is synched with a system that is obsolescing – you will need to clear the calendars when you shut down your Oracle Calendar / Meeting Maker / Sun Java Calendar / etc. server, then have your users re-synch after the migration is completed.

BlackBerry

For clearing the calendar on the Blackberry – see the following webpage:
http://www.blackberry.com/knowledgecenterpublic/livelink.exe/fetch/2000/8021/7925/8142/How_To_-_Reset_the_BlackBerry_device_calendar.html?nodeid=1201826&vernum=1

Palm

For clearing the calendar on a Palm OS, you might use the Purge function:
http://kb.palm.com/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.EXE?New,kb=PalmSupportKB,CASE=obj(5029),ts=Palm_External200173

Windows Mobile (Pocket PC)
For Windows Mobile, you can:
· Open ActiveSync
· Double Click on Calendar.
· Change the settings such that it syncs only 0 past and 0 future appointments.
· SYNC - this will clear all calendar items on the IPAQ / most other Pocket PCs.
Note: Some earlier ActiveSync versions attempt to interpret the default Sumatra Category as a date field. If you have Windows Mobile PCs you should remove the keyword AFTER you have done your quality assurance testing on the migration. Sumatra also has a COM add-in for Outlook that will accomplish the same thing on a user-by-user basis.

NotifyLink

Updated September 10, 2009 with info from Notify Technology.

Migration for NotifyLink Enterprise Server (NLES) Users with recent versions.

An administrator must:

1. Make sure the NLES server and device software are up to date.
2. Create the new mail and PIM servers
3. Open the user administration list and for each user to be moved, select the “Edit User” button.
4. On the “Edit User” page, switch the email and PIM servers to the new servers that were created.
5. This should all be done after the actual migration is complete on the server side. Notify Tech claims their software should handle the rest. It should re-prime accounts and issue full resynchronization commands. The device PIM stores will be automatically cleared and reloaded with the new account info.
   
   Earlier versions of their software ran a more complicated, non-automatic process.

So if you're migrating to Zimbra and using Palms....

We just moved a site from Meeting Maker into Zimbra and everything was ducky until we got an email stating:

"After taking our Meeting Maker Database and getting it imported into Zimbra,
our Palm OS devices that are receiving over-the-air syncs to their Zimbra
calendars lock up and head into an infinite reboot cycle when they try to
access their calendar data. It appears that something in the formatting of
the calendar data now pretty much just causes the brain of the Palm devices
to explode... because the problem does not extend to Blackberry devices."

Being the responsible guys we are, we freaked. Then we read that the problem doesn't happen with BlackBerry devices. In calendar migrations if we do something really wrong we expect it to fail everywhere. Since they used Notify for both Palm and BlackBerry sync from Zimbra we started looking at Palm. I think I have an old VIIx sitting on my discarded electronics drawer from the days a decade ago when we started this company.

Being exceedingly motivated, however, our client managed to come up with a solution before us. Their significantly greater knowledge of the Palm probably also had a lot to do with this.

Seems to be related to recurring meetings on the Palm, which interpreted some instance as "Zero" and didn't like it -- but didn't gracefully recover either.

They suggest other users with this problem (which I really hope there never are any, but know there will be some out there)

1. Go to http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk5.htm
2. Download the zipped Windows EXE.
3. In Advanced Apps there is a file called 'dbscan'
4. Open this on your PC
5. It should set itself up to install on your next sync. Read the instructions! It is a database integrity checker.
6. It will advise of the corrupt files and give you the opportunity to delete them from your handheld.
7. Run a sync again - but set the options for **handheld to overwrite pc** - this will sort out the problem.

I would really like to thank the folks at Pimlico Software for their really good application for Palms!