Since questions about synchronizing Ecco with Outlook seem to come up frequently, I decided to put together this page with some screenshots that will hopefully help.

I did a “scorched earth” installation of Palm Desktop, i.e. uninstalled everything relating to Palm, Ecco, and Palm synchronization, deleted any old installation directories, etc. then re-installed Palm Desktop 4.1.

Did the registry hack to rename Application0- Application3 to Application4- Application7 (see Tom Hoots' notes on the Yahoo Ecco-Pro group for details on these registry fixes.)

Installed Ecco,

deleted Users.dat from Palm directory,

did a hard reset of the Palm,

synched Palm with Ecco.

I then installed PDAsync. (xtndConnect seems to be an identical product, appears that PDAsync is a re-badged copy of xtndConnect)

During the installation I choose (no device)

Select Outlook and Ecco application translators.

I use PDAsync only for synching Ecco and Outlook, I don’t think it will be able to do that if you set up any of the PDA conduits…

Open the PDAsync application from the Start>All Programs menu (don’t use the toolbar button in Outlook yet, or you won’t get the configuration screen…

Un-select Contacts and Tasks (or whatever ones you won’t be using…)

(Note: DO NOT go and explore the Settings>Mappings until you have synched the first time!  xtndpc.exe will hang and tie up 99% of your CPU…  I believe that it needs to do the first sync in order to find all the Ecco folders and properties…)

click Synchronize

Note: you must have Ecco running with the file you want to sync open (this appears to be a slight weirdness that is particular to Ecco…)

I chose “Replace Ecco Pro records with Outlook records so that Outlook wouldn’t get touched.

There was a test appointment in Outlook:

I noticed that it didn’t get the body of the message in Ecco.

I added a sub-item in Ecco.

And it shows up in Outlook.  Unfortunately, it Overwrites the note in the Outlook appt. body.

When you look at the field mapping (this is OK to do after the first sync and the Ecco file has been mapped), you see that the Ecco “Outline Note” is marked as (Read only)…

This “one-way” sync of the notes is a limitation in this scheme…

My usual operation was to synch part from Outlook and part from Ecco.  To do that, I set Ecco to only sync the apps I want.

Then I install Chapura Pocket Mirror Pro 3.1.6 and during the installation, only select the Palm apps I want to synch with Outlook.

When I synch, the selected conduits run.

As you can see from the log, Ecco’s Pilot Memos synched properly, and other then the one contact with a very large note attached, the other Palm apps synched with Outlook

FWIW, this is close to how I used to work with Ecco and Outlook together.  I used to synch my To-Do’s with Ecco as well as the Pilot Memos, and used my EccoHelpers add-in to manage my GTD methodology.  I didn’t always use PDAsync to synch Ecco and Outlook, but found that it was a really nice addition.  I usually do my contacts and appointments in Outlook and would occasionally synch them to Ecco so that I would have them there for reference.