I spent the better part of my day today wearing the OTHER hat that i keep on my coatrack…I got to play IT guy, fixing one of my coworker’s defunked toshiba laptop. The routine was typical: data backup to external drive, wipe windows, reload windows, dig up drivers, reload software and then reload data. Everything was going smoothly, until we hit the restoration of MS Business Contact Manager information. My coworker relies on this to manage the large number of contacts he handles, and it integrates with Outlook 2003 which we already use heavily.

Let me take a step back: we run a Microsoft Small Business Server with an Exchange Server. Since all email, calendar, and tasks are sync’d to the server, one would think that contacts would sync just them same: evidently not the case. Maybe someone can explain to me why. Thats alright, i did a full backup of the outlook data file as well as the MSBCM database before wiping. The snag came when we got restoration: since we werent 100% sure we were going to use MSBCM after the wipe, i decided to handle the backup with a CSV, since it would be more portable to get the data into..well…anything else. What got confusing was when we got to hooking up MSBCM to the database, it wouldnt read the exchange server for data so i had to create a new database locally and load our backup into it. But importing from a CSV requires mapping of the data fields…all 50 or so of them. I guess this isnt as daunting as it seemed, but it was still a pain in the neck.

Also worth mentioning is that MSBCM caused the otherwise snappy, P4 2.0gHz with 1 gb of ram, to take a serious performance hit when running outlook. Not that I was already an outlook hater, but that configuration is teh suck.