Lee over at the Download Squad Squad posted a great little article about How to add Twitter and Facebook support to Pidgin for Windows.  The instructions work perfectly… unless you have a Google Talk-phobic firewall between you and the internet.  Guess who found that out the hard way?

Fortunately there is another plugin that can add Twitter support to Pidgin.  Lee notes the microblog-purple plugin can also help Pidgin tweet but isn’t quite as fully featured as the recommended pidgin-twitter plugin.  In practice this means it doesn’t show profile icons or other such niceties, but it has the advantage that it doesn’t rely on Google Talk so can get through the firewall in our office.  This makes the choice of plugin pretty simple for me.

To add Twitter without requiring a working Google Talk account:

1. Download the installer from the microblog-purple plugin project page.
2. Quit Pidgin if it is currently running
3. Run the microblog-purple plugin installer and walk through the typical installation process. Make sure the “Run Pidgin” checkbox is selected on the final dialog then click the Finish button.
4. When Pidgin restarts you will need to right click the Pidgin tray icon and choose plugins.  Find the Twitgin plugin in the list, ensure its entry is checked, then click Close. 
5. In the buddy list window select the Accounts\Manage menu option, then click the Add button. Select TwitterIM as the account protocol then supply your account details.  Most of the advanced options are fairly low level and may break the plugin functionality if you tinker with them so I’d suggest leaving those alone.  Click Save and you should now have a working Twitter.com buddy added to a new Twitter group in your buddy list.

Now I can tweet from the comfort of my own desktop without the HDD clutter and resource consumption of yet another instant messenger or microblogging client!

With the current popularity of digital cameras and cameraphones, surely my hard drive can’t be the only one bursting at the seams with the sheer volume of photos we are capturing? A quick scan found 26 Gb of photos on my laptop… no wonder I usually have less than 150 Mb of disk space free!  In this post I’m going to explain how to reclaim your harddrive using Adobe Photoshop Elements (PSE) 6’s removable media feature to move lower value photos offline without losing the ability to work with those photos within PSE.

Photoshop Elements Move to Removable Media Feature

I’ve been using a digital photography workflow based upon Peter Krogh’s work in The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers.  As a result I have been rating my photos before processing them, and have a number rated Neutral that are of low value and unlikely to be used, but I’m not quite ready to delete.  These are ideal candidates for moving to cheaper and more flexible offline storage to free up disk space.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 has a feature that allows you to move content to removable media while still allowing you to see the files within PSE’s catalog.  If you subsequently attempt to edit one of these files, or perform any other action that would require access to the source file, you will be prompted to reload or remount the media the file was moved to. 

When moving photos offline your original file will be substituted with a proxy file: a low resolution version that will be used when viewing the file in the catalog.  The size of the proxy file can be configured using the Edit\Preferences\Files menu option.

My photos are taken using a Nikon D70S that I usually keep in "Raw + Basic" mode.  This means I have two copies of each photo, one in the ubiquitous JPEG  format and a higher quality RAW file in case I need to edit the photo.  To pick my ideal proxy file size I needed to balance the disk space saving against the usability benefits of a larger proxy file.  My tests with a sample photo generated the following proxy file sizes:

I’ve included the generated files so you can gain an appreciation for the quality and size of the proxy files you will be working with in the browser.

As a result of these tests I’ve chosen to use the 800 x 600 proxy file setting.  This replaces 6 Mb of photos with 270 Kb of proxy files, which in rough figures means I could replace my whole photo collection with about 1 Gb of proxy files if I chose to move them all offline!

Moving photos offline

Preparation

Before moving my photos offline I like to write all of my Photoshop Elements metadata to the files, in case I need to access those files from another program or my catalog becomes damaged in some way.  You can do this by selecting a group of files and using the File\Write Keyword Tags and Properties Info to File menu option.  All tag (but not album) information will be written to the images, where the metadata can be read by any XMP aware program.

Writing the tags to file also helps you to capture some data that will be lost during the move.  The File\Copy/Move to Removable Disk function moves all selected files to a single destination directory, so you will be flattening your directory structure unless you chose to move files offline in many smaller batches.  For low value photos I don’t believe retaining the directory structure is worth the effort, but I do use Phil Harvey’s exiftool program to write directory information to a text file in case I change my mind later.  A command such as this:

exiftool -r -m -p "$XMP-xmp:Rating,$Directory\$FileName,$Keywords" * > Ratings.txt

produces a comma separated value (CSV) file such as the following:

1,2007_08_04_LindaAndBenjamin\MSD_20070804_160136.dng,
0,2007_08_04_LindaAndBenjamin\MSD_20070804_160136.xmp,
,2007_08_04_LindaAndBenjamin\MSD_20070804_160140.JPG,Ben S, Linda, Neutral

which should have sufficient information to allow reconstruction of the directory structure if it ever proves necessary to do so.

Execution

To move your photos offline use the following steps:

1. Open the File\Copy/Move to Removable Disk menu option, select the "Move File" check box, and click Next.
   
2. Select the drive you want to move the files to, enter a volume label, select the directory to write the files to, then click Done.
   You will notice in the screenshot that I use a month based directory naming scheme when moving files offline.  This makes it easier to find the files in other programs without requiring much effort to implement.  If my directory structure had been retained by PSE I wouldn’t have needed to bother with this sub-step.
   Please note: If moving files to a large capacity removable media such as a USB harddrive it is not worth uniquely naming each batch or directory as the data does not get referenced in future dialogs or the Browser’s Folders view.
   
3. If moving files to a partially used disk click Yes when the following warning appears:
   "This disk you have inserted is not empty. Would you like to add to this disk?"
4. When the copy step is complete you will see the following dialog:
   "Disk 1 is done…".  Click OK.
5. If you selected the "Move Files" option in step 1), the following dialog will appear.
   
   Click Yes and the online copies of your files will be deleted, potentially leaving the offline files as your only remaining copies.

Followup

Once the files have been moved offline, the files will still be visible in the catalog but will display an icon whenever the removable media is not currently mounted or loaded.  The files will also be visible in the "Offline Media" section of the folder tree in the "Folder Locations" browser view.

Despite the fact that PSE can detect which files are currently offline, the Adobe developers neglected to provide an easy way to search for offline files in the catalog itself.  To work around this limitation I add an "Offline" tag to all photos that have been moved offline.  I considered recording this information using an album instead, but I’ve yet to find a way to search for all photos not in an album (e.g. only find photos not in the offline photos album) so albums could not support my intended workflow.  

Moving them back

Another strange oversight by Adobe is there is no obvious way to reverse moving files offline.  PSE obviously knows that a file has been moved offline onto removable media, but there is no simple "Move file back online" option provided to reverse the process.

Instead you must use the File\Move menu option to relocate the offline files back to online data storage. 

1. In PSE’s browser select the offline files you wish to move back online
2. Select the File\Move menu option. 
3. Browse for the destination directory to move the files to, then click OK.

While this is easy enough to perform there are some notable limitations:

• Proxy files that are no longer required don’t get removed
• Your old directory structure is not restored
• Your new directory structure is not retained

So moving files offline and back will consume more disk space than if you had just left your files online in the first place, and you will lose implied metadata (your directory structure) in the process.

I’ve discussed my vision of calendar nirvana in previous posts, and tried to get closer to it using Microsoft Outlook’s inbuilt ability to publish calendars to the internet.  As I discovered this feature is rather limited and couldn’t publish to Google Calendar (despite Microsoft’s assurances otherwise). 

Google has recently released a Google Calendar Sync application to perform uni- or bi-directional synchronisation of your Outlook and Google Calendars.  Its time to test if this will help me publish my up-to-date master calendar to the web.

Testing 1-way: Microsoft Outlook calendar to Google Calendar

My calendar data is pretty important to me so I’ll be testing a one-way sync from my master calendar (in Outlook) to Google Calendar before I’ll consider enabling the 2 way option.  As a seasoned beta tester of PIM software I know how painful duplicate or corrupted calendars can be so there was no way I’d risk giving an unproven tool write access to my master calendar if I have any other option.  I also backed up my Outlook calendar (zipped a copy of my .pst file) and exported my current calendar from Google Calendar, using the private iCal link, before installing the software.  Did I mention that I’ve been burnt before when testing PIM software?

The Google Calendar Sync application is quite small (version 0.9.3.0 was 662 kb to download and 1.3 Mb to install) and the UI to configure it is fairly spartan.  A summary of my key installation and configuration steps are included below:

1. Backup your Outlook calendar before testing the software.  The Outlook calendar can be backed up by closing Outlook and creating a copy of your main calendar’s .pst file, or by taking a copy of your main calendar folder within the Outlook UI.
2. Backup your primary Google Calendar.  This can be done via a right click\Save As on the private iCal link within the Google Calendar’s Manage Calendars options panel.
3. Navigate to Google’s Manage Accounts facility and make use of the Edit personal information option.  At the bottom of this page should be the following section:
   

   Associate email addresses with your account

   ---

   Adding email addresses helps Google associate useful information with your Google Account. For example, Google Calendar can show invitations sent to any of your addresses.

   If you haven’t previously done so add email addresses for your default Outlook account, and any other email accounts that would have been used to invite you to the calendar appointments. This is required to address one of the known limitations of the sync software that would otherwise prevent certain calendar entries from syncing.

4. Complete the previous step by opening the emails sent by Google and clicking on the verification links.
5. Download a copy of the Google Calendar Sync application and install it, accepting all of the default options.
6. Select the 1 way sync from Outlook to Google Calendar option, and enter your Google Calendar account settings. 
7. Save the configuration and your calendar will begin syncing to Google Calendar.

The Verdict: Most events synchronise, but not all

Google Calendar Sync did a pretty good job of publishing my calendar, but refused to synchronise certain events despite attempts to force them to be published. 

Most of my recurring appointments didn’t make it across.  The most difficult example to synchronise was a meeting scheduled for Monday, Wednesday and Friday most weeks (with specific instances cancelled on public holidays etc.), but there were many simple recurring appointments (e.g. weekly and monthly meetings) that also refused to synchronise.

A quick look at the log file (C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Calendar Sync\logs\20080317T114410Z.log) found a number of entries similar to:

Loading outlook event 00000000539C5B9F3396574893319BF96A8E727024512600
SEVERE: Unable to load tz label
SEVERE: Load failed (see details above)
sync to right -> import right event to left calendar

and

Loading outlook event 00000000539C5B9F3396574893319BF96A8E7270A4452700
SEVERE: Load failed (see details above)

Unfortunately I haven’t worked out how to resolve these (or even how to identify the problem events) and the issue isn’t covered by the current version of the FAQ or known limitations resources provided by Google.  So the application appears to have a lot of potential but the current version can’t be relied upon due to issues with synchronisation quality.

[via Teck.in and Lifehacker]

Previously I’ve discussed my version of calendar nirvana, and just how far I am away from it today.  its time to start removing some of those roadblocks by freeing my master calendar from its Outlook shackles and sharing it (appropriately) with others.

I’ve been keeping my master calendar in Outlook 2007 for a few months now.  Before that I was a Palm Desktop user (or more accurately an Agendus for Palm Desktop user), but the lack of software support for Palm Desktop based data wore me down until I eventually decided to convert.  Publishing my data to a web based calendar was one of the major triggers for this decision.

Outlook 2007 includes a calendar "Publish to Internet" feature so this was a natural starting point for my quest.  It supports two possible destinations – Publish to Office Online or Publish to WebDAV Server – and I have tested them both.

Publish to Office Online

Publish to Office Online takes an Outlook calendar and sends it through to one of Microsoft’s online calendar services.  The steps to enable this are discussed in depth in an article on the Office Online website and a post on the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog.  A summary of the key steps are included below:

1. Right click on the Outlook calendar folder you wish to publish, and select the Publish to Internet\Publish to Office Online menu option
2. In the resultant dialog select the section of your calendar, level of detail and how accessible you want your online calendar to be.  For my purposes I want all of my detail to be up there (for my family’s benefit) but I want to restrict access to the information.
   
3. Click on the Advanced button at in the dialog.  Here you can control how frequently the information and updates are published.  The defaults were fine in my case, except I did want private details published to the site.
   
4. After clicking OK then OK you will be prompted for your Windows Live user ID (Passport) credentials so the information can be uploaded to Office Online.  After successfully entering this you will see a progress box as the data is uploaded.
5. Once the uploaded is complete you will be asked whether you want to notify others of the calendar’s availability.  In my case I wanted to make my family aware of the new calendar so I clicked Yes.  This sends an email with the webdav:// link to the calendar so they can subscribe to it from "any iCalendar compatible client".
   

The Verdict: Simple, but ineffective

The whole process is relatively painless, but the service didn’t live up to its advertising.  The post on the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog mentioned earlier contained the following statements:

Any application that can read an .ics file can subscribe to the calendar. Users that do not have an .ics aware mail application can view the calendar at Office Online in a web browser.

Here is a short list of popular clients that implement ICalendar functionality. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list and that there are many other applications that provide this functionality.

Application	Publisher
Chandler (PIM)	Open Source Applications Foundation
Evolution	Novell & GNOME
Facebook.com	Facebook.com
Google Calendar	Google
iCal and iCal Server	Apple Computer
Kontact	The Kontact Team
Lotus Notes	IBM
Microsoft Entourage	Microsoft
Microsoft Exchange	Microsoft
Microsoft Outlook	Microsoft
Windows Calendar	Microsoft
Sun Java Calendar Server	Sun
Zimbra Collaboration Suite	Zimbra

My whole reason for publishing my calendar is so my family can access it from both Thunderbird/Lightning and Google Calendar.  I used the notify feature and then tried to help them subscribe to my calendar, but both of these products refused to read the data.  Details of the problems are listed below.

Using the "Add by URL" feature in Google Calendar resulted in an error message.

Changing the webcal:// to http:// didn’t help.  When I tried to embed the relevant Windows Live ID username and password in the URL (e.g. http://user:pass@URL) this wasn’t accepted as a valid URL because my Windows Live ID contains an at (@) symbol.  I’ve tried to work around the issue a number of ways but have had no success.  Others have reported the same problem so I’m not holding out much hope for this technique.

In Thunderbird/Lightning I tried similar approaches to get the the webcal:// URL to work but no matter what I did no data would appear in the GUI.  It would rarely complain about the URL, but it wouldn’t achieve its intended purpose.

In fact the only application I found that could subscribe to the calendar was Outlook 2007.  Even when I pointed Firefox at the URL it had difficulties.  It should have tried to download the .ics file but I ended up with this error message instead.

I’m not 100% sure where the problem lies but I believe it is a combination of requiring a Windows Live ID to subscribe to the calendar (see the description in the notification email above for detail) and using WebDAV instead of vanilla http/s.  This feature must have worked in the past because Chaz and others have posted about it but it definitely isn’t working right now.  I was originally willing to consider that the iCalendar clients might be the problem… until Firefox reported the redirection issue.  Too much evidence is mounting against Office Online in this case.

Publish to WebDAV Server

Using the Publish to WebDAV Server is a little more difficult than the previous option.  Not because of the Outlook configuration, but rather that you need to have write access to a suitable WebDAV server to store your calendar.  They are not as common as other forms of hosting though there is at least one free iCalendar WebDAV service available (ironically a Mac centric site).  Once again the steps to enable this are discussed in depth in an article on the Office Online website.  A summary of the key steps are included below:

1. Right click on the Outlook calendar folder you wish to publish, and select the Publish to Internet\Publish to WebDAV Server menu option
2. In the resultant dialog enter the http: URL for the folder to publish the calendar to into the Location box.  Outlook will automatically generate the .ics file name itself.
3. Select the section of your calendar, level of detail and how accessible you want your online calendar to be.  For my purposes I want all of my detail to be up there (for my family’s benefit) but I want to restrict access to the information. 
   
4. Click on the Advanced button at in the dialog.  Here you can control how frequently the information and updates are published.  The defaults were fine in my case, except I did want private details published to the site.
   
5. After clicking OK then OK you will be prompted for your WebDAV credentials (if required) so the information can be uploaded to your server.  After successfully entering this you will see a progress box as the data is uploaded. 

The Verdict: Unusual pre-requisites, but worked with Thunderbird/Lightning

Assuming you have access to a WebDAV server this option is also pretty painless to implement.  It too was unable to be subscribed to by Google Calendar, even when embedding the username/password in the URL, but the same URl worked fine with Thunderbird/Lightning even without embedding the username and password!

Results

The current Outlook 2007 calendar publication methods are a little disappointing and don’t deliver the outcomes they promise.  I’d like to see them support more standard publication methods – after all even Outlook’s Internet Free/Busy option can publish to a standard FTP server – and services other than the two limited options currently available.  I’m really surprised there hasn’t been some tie in with Windows Live Calendar if nothing else but it would be nice to think they would look further afield than that.

For the moment I’m using the WebDAV publication mechanism as a stop gap for sharing my master schedule but I’m actively looking for something better.  Calendar nirvana is still looking pretty far away right now.

Simon over at Download Squad recently drew my attention to the Capster utility:

Capster is a small executable that allows you to select applications that will start upon boot-up only if Caps Lock is on. And by small, we mean small, as in 5 kilobytes.

What is great about this is you now have a way to chose between three different PC startup profiles through holding a single key after the logon dialog:

1. Shift key = ignore applications in Startup folder
2. No key = run applications in Startup folder, excluding those using Capster’s Caps On setting
3. Capslock key = run applications in Startup folder, including those using Capster’s Caps On setting and excluding those using the Caps Off setting

Why would you want to do this?  In my case I use these for quick PC startup, offline startup (no network) and online startup (networked) respectively.  This brings my laptop to operational status in the quickest time with the major applications I’ll be needing on the day.  e.g. There is no point in me wasting RAM, CPU cycles and time waiting for twhirl to start if I’m not online at the time!

Capster is easy to use.  Simply start the application, browse for the program you want to control, select whether Caps must be on or off, then hit the Create Shortcut button.  This will add the shortcut to your Startup menu for execution the next time you start your PC.

By default most users will probably replace each shortcut in their Startup folder they want to control using Capster, which is a little cumbersome.  My preferred approach is to create a batch file listing all of the "Caps Only" startup applications and calling them that way.  For example I could create a startup-capson.bat file that contained the following entries:

start notepad.exe
start calc.exe

Please note the "start" entry at the beginning of each line.  This ensures the batch file doesn’t wait for Notepad to be shutdown before starting Calc.

Simon obviously didn’t have much use for Capster’s "Caps Off" setting but I can see situations where it would be useful.  In the scenario above I could easily have my offline startup launch a thick client to manage my Google Calendar (e.g. Outlook or Sunbird) and when online launch a thin client (e.g. Google Calendar as a Prism webapp) instead.

If you have applications that you often, but not always, want run at PC startup, download a copy of Capster and save yourself a little time every day!

I like to think of myself as a reasonable person.  I try not to be too demanding, and while I like to keep up with the latest advances in technology I’m usually not right on the bleeding edge.  But the current gulf between my calendar organisational regime and where I want it to be makes me wonder whether my self-image is truly accurate.

I have my own concept of calendar nirvana.  I’ll attain it when I can:

• Create, update and check all of my work, personal and family appointment details at any time and location.  Even when I have no network access and am not in front of my main PC
• Be able to check all of my family’s appointments at any time (including those I’m not participating in)
• Have controlled access to schedules by third parties, so clients, colleagues and myself can arrange meetings at times that are mutually acceptable
• Have all of my calendars work together seamlessly without manual intervention

That doesn’t seem a lot to ask for, does it?  There are a lot of people out there who work and have families so I find it hard to believe I’m the only one who wants their calendars to work this way.

Unfortunately my current calendar regime is nowhere near nirvana.  I’m doing better than most but its still a mess:

• My work calendar (Lotus Notes) won’t share its information with any other application, service or device so its only accessible via my laptop or a web browser.
• My colleagues also use Lotus Notes so I can access their schedule details, but my clients use Outlook so I’m unable to view their availability.
• My personal calendar is in Google Calendar so my whole family can have access, but I rarely work directly in the web UI.  Of late I have been accepting invitations via GMail but in the past I’ve used Thunderbird and Lightning (with the Google Calendar provider) to manage this personal calendar.
• The combined work/personal calendar I use as my master calendar is kept in Outlook 2007, and is bi-directionally synchronised with my Treo.  I manually recreate work appointments in here at the same time I accept/create them in Lotus Notes.  I subscribe to my personal calendar in Outlook and manually copy entries from the Google Calendar subscription to my main calendar.
• The combined work/personal calendar is published a couple of different ways.  I’m publishing internet free/busy (.ifb) information to a personal website so selected clients can have visibility of my availability through Outlook.  I’ve tried a couple of approaches for publishing the content of my calendar for my family’s benefit but have yet to find anything completely satisfactory.
• My family publish their main calendars in Google Calendar.  The alternate between using the web UI and Thunderbird and Lightning (with the Google Calendar provider) to manage this.  Currently the latter approach is preferred because Google Calendar can’t subscribe to my combined work/personal calendar the way it is published today.
• I also subscribe to my family’s and children’s calendars in Outlook 2007 (read only).

As you can see there are a lot of technologies, manual steps and potential failure points in how my calendar is managed today.  There are also certain aspects of nirvana that I can’t emulate at all (e.g. subscribe to client availability information in Lotus Notes) and would prefer not to do (e.g. store details of work appointments in Google Calendar) but are essential to the way I share my data today.

How can I reach nirvana?  There is no easy answer right now but I’m determined to move closer to my vision of the future and take out the manual steps in my calendar management regime.  I’ll share the good, bad and indifferent steps I take along the way.  Hopefully they may be of use to you in the journey to reach your personal version of calendar nirvana.

As part of my experiments with social media sites I came across the iBlogStats site.  Its a great external dashboard for your blog, but it gave me a nasty shock by highlighting I had about 50 xHTML validation errors on my homepage!

Over the past month I’ve found that my posts have consistently had 40 to 50 validation errors before I manually hunt them down and resolve them.  All of the posts were published using a combination of Windows Live Writer (WLW) and Wordpress.  While I find them to be very easy to use the lack of quality in the output (and the effort required to repair it) made me wonder whether I’d chosen the right platform for my blog.

Some of the errors I was experiencing:

• paragraph end tags with no begin tag
• div tags surrounded by paragraph tags
• attribute construction errors where a title attribute had been moved within hyperlink, and had been concatenated with the href attribute instead of relocated after it
• img tags that weren’t properly terminated

… and the list goes on.  To make matters worse I couldn’t resolve the errors directly in the Wordpress online editor because it insisted on converting div tags to paragraph tags, destroying the visual style of the posts in the process!  I had to maintain a copy of the original post HTML elsewhere, edit it in a text editor then paste the repaired HTML over the existing content shown in the Wordpress editor.  A rather tedious process.

A little time on Google found some tips that have dramatically improved the quality of automatically generated xHTML:

• Turn off the visual editor in Wordpress: 
  (via Weblog Tools Collection and More than scratch the surface) 
  In Wordpress’s admin interface, switch to the users tab and edit your current user. Uncheck the "Use the visual editor when writing" option.  This resolves the "div converted to paragraph tag" issue mentioned above, and various other errors introduced when Wordpress "fixes" your HTML, so validation errors can now be repaired online.
• Configure Windows Live Writer to publish xHTML:
  (via whateverblog)
  Windows Live Writer did such a good job of detecting my blog settings that I didn’t even think of manually configuring it to publish xHTML.  How embarrassing! In WLW select the Weblog\Edit Weblog Settings menu item.  Open the Advanced configuration options pane.  Make sure "Markup Type" is set to XHTML.
• Be careful where you "Insert Tags"
  If you use the Web Layout view to write your post, be careful where you call the "Insert Tags" feature.  WLW uses paragraph tags and non-breaking space to add blank lines to your post.  If you are not careful you might insert your tags after a non-breaking space on a blank line and inadvertently wrap the tag’s div directly within paragraph tags.  When you validate the results this will be highlighted as an error.

While some errors remain the volume is more manageable (a couple per post) and they tend to be easier to resolve.  The most painful one remaining is the "attribute construction error" but it is looking more and more like this has been introduced by one of the plugins I’m using.  I’ll continue debugging my configuration and report back if I ever manage to track this last major bug down!

Last week I discussed how to make the Lotus Notes email client play nice with others by exporting individual email messages as .eml files.  This week we’ll cover how to use those .eml files to import email into the Thunderbird 2 client.

I was surprised this process wasn’t more straight forward.  Thunderbird 2 stores its emails in the mbox format (or a derivative thereof) and is capable of opening emails saved in the .eml format.  For whatever reason the developers didn’t see fit to allow either directly importing .eml files or saving .eml messages to Thunderbird folders after you manually open them.  Surprising oversights that hopefully will be resolved by the Thunderbird 3 release.

The steps to work around these limitations are:

1. Go to the ImportExportTools (MboxImport enhanced) homepage and download a copy of the .xpi (current version: 1.6.0.1)
2. Open Thunderbird and select the Tools\Add-ons menu option
3. Click the Install button and select the file you .xpi file you downloaded
4. After the timeout click the Install Now followed by Restart Thunderbird buttons
5. After it restarts, navigate to the Thunderbird folder where you wish to import email.
6. Select the Tools\Import/Export in mbox/eml format\Import all eml files from a directory menu item, select the directory you used when exporting your Lotus Notes messages then click OK
   

Your email will now be visible in Thunderbird!  I’d recommend browsing through your imported messages to make sure all of your email looks OK, but there are unlikely to be any problems because Thunderbird’s eml support is more robust than that embedded within Outlook and Outlook Express.

These instructions will also work for importing .eml files exported by other programs.  See the Mozillazine knowledge base article on importing and exporting your email to find out how to import your email from other programs to Thunderbird.

The Lotus Notes email client doesn’t play nice with others.  Its native export facilities only support a handful of document formats (text, CSV or Lotus 1-2-3), and few programs support importing directly from Lotus Notes.  So your email is effectively locked within the client unless you are willing to lose email metadata during the manual export process, or pay at least $50 USD for a third party application that makes up for the client’s woeful support for exporting.  I don’t know about you, but I have a moral issue with spending my hard earned cash on functionality I only really need for a few hours and should have been built into Lotus Notes in the first place.

If you have Outlook installed you might be able to try the Outlook 2003/2002 Add-in: Notes Connector from Microsoft.  This allows you to use Outlook as your client for accessing a Lotus Notes server and copy emails to another PST that way.  Unfortunately administrators are known to prevent the connector from accessing servers because of performance or email policy concerns.

I’ve been using Lotus Notes for almost a decade now and up until recently I’ve just lived with the limitation, but a new email policy at our workplace has changed all of that.  We are now required to be good corporate citizens and manage our email not just by volume, but also by its age.  I can’t begrudge them the change – they are really just forcing me to do what I should have been doing anyway – but it has created a dilemma around the personal email I receive at work.  I don’t want to lock my personal email away in an archive file I can’t access using the email client I have installed at home (Outlook), but they block the only free tool I know of to extract email from Lotus Notes.

An extended Google search session eventually located an article including code to export Lotus Notes email as .eml messages (registration required).  This free way to export email looked like the answer I was looking for, but unfortunately it:

• Required Designer to allow creation of a form in your Lotus Notes database
• Occasionally produced blank emails, emails with sections missing, or emails that were gibberish
• Occasionally stopped during the export process without identifying the problem message or exact error encountered

Obviously this wasn’t an end-user ready solution I could .rely upon for exporting my email.

Rather than giving up on it I found a copy of Lotus Domino Designer, spent some time researching Lotus Notes development, and tried to rework the code to resolve the issues.  The result is the Lotus Notes Email Export project, which has successfully exported a few thousand emails from a couple of different PCs so should now be ready for public consumption. 

Downloads and install instructions for the Lotus Notes agents can be found on the Lotus Notes Email Export homepage.  Once installed, exporting email is as simple as selecting the documents to export, running the agent, and emails will be exported to your HDD as individual .eml files in the directory of your choice.  In a future post I’ll explain how I’ve imported these into other email clients and directly to IMAP servers for use via webmail clients.

I hope you find this code as useful as I have, and please feel free to share your experiences with us using the comments section below!

Have you ever tried to determine the changes between two versions of a spreadsheet, only to be thwarted by the comparison feature in your Office Suite?  My encounters with Microsoft Office versions 95 through to 2007 certainly have had mixed results.  While Microsoft Word’s capabilities are generally OK, the comparison features in the rest of the suite (assuming one is provided at all) have not been able to meet my requirements.  Thankfully we don’t need to rely upon these any longer.

WinMerge is an Open Source application best known for its ability to compare and merge text files and directories.  What is not so well known is it can compare Office files as well. 

Basic Office Document Support (Word/Excel Only)

If you only require the ability to compare Excel or Word files:

1. Download the WinMerge installer and begin the install
2. When you reach the "Installation Type" dialog, select the Plugins entry in component list
3. When prompted ensure the "Enable Explorer context menu integration" option is selected
4. Finish the installation

If you have Microsoft Office installed on your system, you are now able to compare Excel spreadsheets or Word documents using WinMerge.  Simply select two documents in Windows Explorer, right click on them, and select the WinMerge item on the context menu.  An example of the comparison between two spreadsheets is included below.

Extended Office Document Support (Various Office Document Types and Suites)

If your Office document comparison requirements are a little more sophisticated, or you don’t have Microsoft Office installed on your system, it is fairly easy to add support for the following document types:

These capabilities are added by the freely available xdocdiff WinMerge Plugin.  To install (with thanks to the xdocdiff WinMerge Plugin homepage):

1. Follow the "Basic Office Document Support" steps above
2. Run WinMerge
3. Select the "Automatic Unpacking" option from the "Plugins" menu
4. Close WinMerge
5. Download the xdocdiff WinMerge Plugin
6. Unzip the file
7. Copy xdoc2txt.exe and zlib.dll to the WinMerge program folder. (Where WinMerge.exe is located. Default: "C:\Program Files\WinMerge")
8. Copy amb_xdocdiffPlugin.dll to the "MergePlugins" sub folder in the WinMerge program folder

The usage steps are the same as before: select two documents in Windows Explorer, right click on them, and select the WinMerge item on the context menu.  An example of the comparison between two spreadsheets is included below.  You will noticed that this plugin does not support comparison of document properties (a feature included in the builtin Excel functionality) but I believe that is a small price to pay for the additional document support.

So next time you need to compare two Office documents don’t go hunting around your Office suite’s menus – WinMerge them!