Recently joined this forum after ordering an n900 (no it hasn't shipped ). What a great place. Looking forward to spending time here.

Having come from Palm OS and to a much lesser extent WM, n900/Maemo 5 is really exciting. However, Outlook is still my 1st choice for PIMs. WebOS (Palm Pre) can now do this easily for Calendar, Contacts, Tasks and Notes with CompanionLink. http://www.palminfocenter.com/mobile/mvs.asp?ID=9947

I haven't seen anything like this on these boards, or did I miss it?

I have noticed some ML Sync possibilities, but as far as I can tell they all sync to the cloud, which, if anyone has heard what just happened to all SideKick data, then cloud sync may give some pause. ActiveSync will apparently work for MS Exchange, but apparently not for direct desktop sync. There is also the PalmOS Garnet VM, which might be a solution, but it doesn't seem to support Maemo 5 yet http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/.

Suggestions or thoughts?

Nokia PC Suite should sync most basic fields.
Category field WILL NOT SYNC as it is completely not supported and recklessly disregarded by Nokia's PIM department.

I am yet to understand what sync options GPE Calendar gives for Outlook sync.

Nokia PC Suite will support direct desktop synchronization with Outlook.

"Synchronise your Maemo device and your compatible home computer using PC Suite to keep all your calendar entries, tasks, and notes up to date."

source

this also has been confirmed to work in the live-blog from the summit this weekend.

SubCore,

Nokia PC Suite always supported "direct desktop synchronization with Outlook". It never stopped doing so. It also aways supported "direct desktop synchronization with Lotus Notes". No need to call for dev summits to confirm such triviality.
There are, however, some crippling limitations in using th PC Suite which i mentioned above.

Not for the Maemo OS it didn't

i agree with you on the crippling limitations, though. not to mention that it's damn slow.

Yeah, I forgot to mention PC Suite, though my past experience with it was less than wonderful, and many posts on these boards indicate consistent loss of data, buggy behavior, etc.

Regarding category sync, it seems like it will be necessary to create multiple calendars and abandon category sync. That might work, actually, especially if they can be differentiated by color. Hopefully, Maemo 5 and PC Suite will handle all this well.

sorodoros,

You WILL NOT be able to sync a "Sell Nokia phone for its' lousy PIM" task of category "Work:Lunchtime" on your desktop to any particular calendar created on N900.
Same goes for any PIM item on N900 of certain calendar that you would want to sync to a particular category/folder in Outlook.
Colors DO NOT SYNC.

Nokia is world famous for selling this sort of grief for nearly a DECADE.
This DECADE of history shows that some people at the top of the PIM department are clinically insane.

This is a major concern for me too. I run my Outlook on Windows Server 2008 R2, so I can normally access it just as though it was running locally, from any internet connected computer, through RemoteApp, which is like Citrix.

I had been planning to connect using rdesktop, but when I resize Outlook to the N900 screen size, it is quite unusable. I am not sure this would have been feasible on a daily basis, anyway.

Do you think that Office Live Small Business could be the solution?
http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/

If I am understanding what it says, for very little money (£10.99/year), you get Exchange server hosting where you can ActiveSync Outlook email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes.

If I can use this by redirecting just a subdomain (http://mail.mycompany.com), this looks perfect. Seems a bit too perfect to be true really. Am I understanding this correctly?

Jason404,

Might be worth it if they provide Outlook Web Access
Limitation of OWA is that you can not create or use custom views for tasks or appointments.
You can, however, play with folder filtering rules.
OWA is great but not for everyone.

It seems that you can access email accounts from the web. I've signed up, but I have changed the default domain, and now I cannot get in for some reason. I'll try again tomorrow and see if it the same as OWA.

I am not that interested in OWA anyway, as I can access my full Outlook client from anywhere on the web. I am not interested in the web hosting either, and hope I can actually turn that off.

EDIT:
It seems that the email service is just like Hotmail with the Outlook Connector. I am not yet sure if you can still use Categories and Flags with it. It does actually look like a very good way to get 500MB of free web hosting though, and you can change a setting that allows you to upload your own files, avoiding to have to use the templates. The SharePoint Office Workspace thing is good too, and synchronises with Outlook.

As it does not look like you can actually sync phones without Windows Mobile, I am thinking of setting up my own Exchange server. It won't cost me anything (MAPS), but learning Exchange will take a lot of time.