Migrating PIM Data from Windows Mobile to Hero

After buying an Android device, the first thing I started with, is the migration of contacts, calendar entries and tasks from your old phone. I used to have a Windows Mobile phone and actually I did not find the migration process as easy as it should be.

Let's start with the contacts.
As the contacts were stored in the memory area of the phone, and they were enriched with all kind of details over the years, transferring them via the SIM card is not an option. The first thing that Google search provides is the Google Sync application, which is meant to do exactly the same task we are looking for: synchronizing contacts and calendars with a Windows Mobile device (and some others as well) and with my Google Account.
But then where is the problem? Actually it is in the last chapter of the Google Syns feature page:
"Google Sync uses the Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your phone, existing Contacts and Calendar events may be removed from your phone."
I already experineced the same thing, so I know they are not kidding. I would have to do some backup of PIM Data, then estabilish new partnership, then my PIM data would be erased, so I would need to restore my backup... Well, I may be able to do that, but this is not really the process a beginner user would enjoy too much.

Let's look at some other search results for my problem. Maybe OggSync can help me, which is a very popular application, and designed to sync between my Outlook and my Google account. This looks perfect, I can sync my WinMo phone with Outlook, so we have the full chain of connectivity. But this time some technical problems are preventing me to complete the sync: as I start the synchronization, a big exception is reported in a nice red popup, and OggSync is unable to do anything. Well, this problem may already have been fixed, but at the time I was trying this was a dead end for me.

Then what? After a couple of minutes of Googling for a solution, it turns out it is possible to export Outlook Contacts into a CSV file, which can be imported into Google Contacts in the web browser on the PC. OK, exporting goes well, let's see in Excel what we got. Well Excel reformats phone numbers into some other numbers, as it trims the leading zeros for example, so let's close Excel quickly without saving anything. A plain text editor shows the many-many headers and the data belonging to them. I can only hope that in spite the Google tutorial only lists a few columns, all the Outlook headers are properly mapped to their Google counterparts. As far as I have read, this is almost the case if you have an English version of Outlook. But as I used an other language, which resulted in non-english CSV headers, none of the headers were recognized. I translated some to English, but as only a few were documented in the Google tutorial, may of them were not correct. Incorrect headers simply landed into the note field of the contact in Google. Because I was almost giving up finding a proper solution, I decided to move the note entries into their correct input fields for each and every contact.

I had better luck with the calendar data at least. There is an other dedicated Google Application for that, which installed smoothly, and even synced Outlook Calendar with my Google Calendar correctly.

Well, after all, I think there is still some room to polish the process of contact migration from other phones to Hero.

Conclusion:

For beginner users, or for those who fear they may loose PIM data and will not be able to restore them from backup I prefer using OggSync over Google Sync. With some experience however, the official Google way: Googly Sync is recommended.

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