Word: Use Imac as hands free bluetooth / blackberry

I just got a new imac 24 inch aluminum job.  Check it.  It's absolutely beautiful on my desk.  Brings back alot of good memories of being a senior macintosh engineer at a 4000 person company--planning rollouts and handling escalated tech support issues.  

In any case, I also have a blackberry 8830 and a vonage phone sitting on my desk.  Vonage has been bugging me lately because for the most part I never look at my bill but the other day I did and it was over $90/month. I was thinking...is this really worth over $1000/yr? Hell no.  

What I'd really like to do, is consolidate everything down to my cell phone.  I dont know if the economics make sense to do that.  But I started researching cell phone docking stations like this one.    When I get into my car, my cell phone automagically mates with the fx35 I drive and i receive/make calls over the interior sound system.  I want the same thing to happen when I walk into my office.   So, a cellphone docking station essentially would make that happen.  All my cell phone calls would ring on my house phones. Very cool.

But when I got this imac home, I started thinking it would be cool if it would mate with my blackberry when I walked into the room.   You know....instead of the phone ringing, the imac would show me the incoming call, keep call logs, mate with my address book, allow me to dial with the keypad on the keyboard, or basically what this guy is describing too (but in his case in reference to his iphone)  That's what I'd love to have but is it possible?  I dont know!!!

So far, all i could find is this forum entry with the same question I have. 

I got a little aggressive on google and found this though:  a software widget that makes this possible.   BluePhoneElite 2  is what it's called. It's supposed to make your mac your hands free device for your mobile phone: dial/receive calls, manage text msgs, address lookups, etc.   Sounds promising so far.  It's late but I went ahead and downloaded it and yes, I was able to have calls sent to my blackberry 8830 display on my imac.  I could even dial using the keypad.  I wont say it was buggy but a few things I wasn't able to do easily.  Mirasoftware has a list of compatible capabilities on a per phone basis.  Overall, I would give an enormous thumbs up to what these guys are doing.  It has the potential to be very, very, very cool. Now, if they would be so kind as to increase massively the set of capabilities available for the blackberry 8830, I would be happy to give them enormous, unyielding props.  In fact if you work for Mira Software, and you're reading this, please contact me. I'll post an in depth follow up. 

I'm still having trouble syncing my address book with the imac...a topic for another post.  It's late. 

Outlook Sync

At least with the contacts you have stored at online locations like salesforce.com or jigsaw.com, you dont have to worry about syncing those databases on two different computers. But what if you want to sync outlook on two different machines?  Enter Sync2 for Microsoft Outlook.  It allows you to synchronize Outlook on multiple PC's without a server. Essentially, you can clone your .PST.  There's actually lots of widgets on that website. 

Here's a competitor at Syncing.net.   And another one called OutlookSync with an decent website too.  If what you want is Outlook Sync, one of these 3 will do. 

Delete Duplicate Contacts in Outlook 2003

Let's see if we understand your problem.  You've got tons of contact databases spread all over various email, mobile, crm and social networking sites.  Each entity brings with it new contacts you don't have in any of your other databases. Inevitably, you end up with duplicate contacts.  So, you think to yourself, why not try one of those "duplicate remover" tools.   So you either opt for Outlook's built in functionality or you buy a tool or subscribe to Plaxo's premium. 

but you run these widgets and invariably, you worry you're going to delete something important. Maybe you put a note in both copies of a contact. how do you merge these things anyway?   Then reality hits because your quota is hanging over your head. 

Well, if you opt to go low tech and you want to focus just on Outlook, here's how they prescribe the solution.  

I want you to focus on the concept of Available fields and adding not only the Modified field, which shows you when you last modified that contact but also...if you're like me and you worry about notes....add the Notes field too.   Now you can fairly rapidly scan through contacts and delete as you go. 

Wait a second, it would be better if you could hire someone to do this for you. yes, they are out there too. Reducing the value of this blog.  But isnt that the world we want to live in?

Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager

Speaking of CRM integration into Outlook. Ahem. Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager.

In pure Microsoft style, there's way too much feature information to digest.  

I guess the good news is they have apparently improved synchronization of BCM with Windows Mobile based Pocket PC.