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Here are two Outlook migration tips I thought readers might want to know about. The first tip has to do with upgrading ANSI .pst files to UNICODE files. A user we'll call Bob was running Outlook 2003, but his PST file was originally created with Outlook 2000 (he had previously upgraded his computer from Windows 2000 to Windows XP and had upgraded Office 2000 to Office 2003). The problem was that Outlook 2000 only supported ANSI .pst files, which meant when his .pst file reached 2 GB, Outlook choked (actually it choked long before that point was reached). Outlook 2003 had introduced UNICODE format for .pst files, but Bob hadn't tried to upgrade his PST file from ANSI to UNICODE (Bob got scared off by some Microsoft Knowledge Base articles he read but couldn't understand on the subject.)

Recently, Bob decided to buy a new computer running Windows Vista with 2007 Office System installed, and he wants to (a) migrate some of his mail folders to the new machine while ditching others to clean up his Personal Folders a bit, and (b) make sure his new .pst file is UNICODE so it can grow to 20 GB in size instead of 2 GB (Bob loves keeping emails). What's the absolute rock-bottom easiest way for him to do this? Simple:

1. Rename the Outlook 2003 .pst file as Outlook_OLD.pst and copy it from the C:\Documents and Settings\Bob\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook folder on the old (XP) computer and save it onto a portable USB drive.


2. Copy Outlook_OLD.pst from the USB drive to the C:\Users\Bob\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook folder on the new (Vista) computer.


3. Start Outlook 2007 on the new computer and create a new .pst file by setting up a new Internet email account with your service provider. By default this new .pst file will be in UNICODE format.


4. Select File, then Open, then Outlook Data File, and select the Outlook_OLD.pst file to open it.


5. Drag the mail folders you want to keep from your old Personal Folders (ANSI .pst file) into your new Personal Folders (UNICODE .pst file).


The second tip began as a question that a friend of mine had posed. He had been helping a customer migrate from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007 when one of the users at the company said "What happened to all my contacts?" My friend said, "Your contacts are still there, just click Contacts in the Navigation pane and you'll see them." "That's not what I meant," the user replied, saying, "Where are the recipients that used to be displayed when I started typing someone's name in the TO field of a new message window?" "Oh that," my friend said, "They're in your Contacts folder just like before." "No they aren't," the user replied, "Some of those recipients were never in my Contacts folder, I just typed them directly into my TO box and re-used them whenever I needed them." My friend thought, Yikes!

It's hard to believe how some users manage (or mismanage) their contacts, and what this user had been doing was making use of Outlook autocomplete entries that were automatically saved in his Outlook.nk2 (Outlook nickname) file, which can store up to 1000 recipients on a first-in first-out basis. Unfortunately his .nk2 file had been lost during the migration, so the user was out of luck, but my friend had learned a lesson and was wondering how he could avoid this issue in the future. It turns out you can simply copy the .nk2 file from the old computer to the new one (saving it in the Outlook profile folder) and that way users who insist on storing their contacts in their nickname file instead of their Contacts folder won't be bummed out after a migration.



Outlook nickname (.nk2) files are fun, so maybe we'll revisit them in a future issue of this newsletter.

ITworld.com

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