Pocket PCs not allowed at work. Help!

[BigDan37]

I just bought a Toshiba E335 which I am in love with. I also just found out that the malevolent IT department at the large company I work at does not support Pocket PCs, only Palm based PDAs. Can anyone give me some advice about sinking up my Office Outlook to my PDA without physically connecting it to the computer? I have the cradle and ActiveSync hooked up on my home PC. Is there any way I could upload any changes made on my Outlook at work and sync it every night or am I dreaming? Any input would be appreciated.

[Thinkingmandavid]

Let me get this straight, you want to use your ppc but they only support palm? will they let you sync your ppc even if they dont support it. You have the forum as a good source of info as it is.
To answer your question, if you dont sync using the cradle, you can sync using your ir port. If your work computer doesnt have this, then you would need to purchase it and it will go directly into your usb port. Another option is using a combo blue tooth secure digital card and pc card. They sell them at best buy and they are in the same package, but I am not aware of how good they are.

[Scott R]

I would imagine that his IT department's rules have less to do with physically connecting the PPC to his desktop via a USB or serial cable and are, instead, rules prohibiting him from installing his own software (in this case ActiveSync).

Scott

[maximus]

I just bought a Toshiba E335 which I am in love with. I also just found out that the malevolent IT department at the large company I work at does not support Pocket PCs, only Palm based PDAs. Can anyone give me some advice about sinking up my Office Outlook to my PDA without physically connecting it to the computer? I have the cradle and ActiveSync hooked up on my home PC. Is there any way I could upload any changes made on my Outlook at work and sync it every night or am I dreaming? Any input would be appreciated.

Uh, do you have the administrator level password on your office PC ? Most PCs on my company have their USB port turned-off by default. The only way around this is to get a cracker software, let the PC run overnight, get the admin password, install USB driver, install activesync.

But the action above might get you a warning letter :wink:

[Tracy Daubenspeck]

If you can RAS into work, and you can conect to your mail server via RAS, you can set up a profile on your home machine with outlook connected to your work server. Then set up activesync on this profile. It's a little kludgy, but I have made it work for me.

Tracy

[orangehat]

It sounds more like the IT dept doesn't want to support yet another device, even if it is a PocketPC. We support both Palm's and PocketPC and even a number of Blackberry units without too much trouble (but we're a small shop with under 1000 employees). Sounds like you need somebody higher up in the company to add PocketPC's to the list of support devices.

[BigDan37]

They are tight with their admin privileges. I think a remote hook-up to my Outlook would probably be the best solution. I heard that Yahoo used to have something where you could upload your Intellisync (Palm) to your Yahoo profile and download it on another machine. Do you know if ActiveSync has anything like this?

[cslaughtermd]

I work in a hospital and although the IT support is decent, they are very strict and will now allow installation of any unauthorized programs. They took forever to even support palm and I had to fill out 5 or 6 software installation requests and even then, they didn't start supporting PPC for a year or so, until enough employees higher up on the totem pole than myself were using them. I'd keep working up the chain and requesting at least installation of activesync even if they won't support it. Good luck!

[jimski]

Maybe you should buy your IT Department a subscription to Pocket PC Magazine or better yet, direct them to this site. Remind them that the twenty first century started a couple years back.

Once you have convinced them, you will need to volunteer to be their BETA test site. Have fun with ActiveSYNC.

[davidspalding]

Petition the IT department heads, identify the productivity gains you'd get (don't even talk about MP3s or ebooks or avantgo with them .... in fact, you might want to NOT do any avantgo syncing at work, if they're worried about Internet use.... Syncing with your Exchange server data at work via VPN at home jus to sync data is silly, from an IT perspective.

Also, I'm curious as to the details of syncing a pda with two profiles (two user profiles, or just a separate Outlook profile?). Details?

[Mitch D]

The other option (although I am sure I will be shoot for mentioning it) is to purchase a cheap Palm (Zire) and sync it at work. Take it home and sync it to your outlook and ActiveSync to your Toshiba...

[davidspalding]

good idea, as I'm sure a really cheap Palm III could be had ... but wouldnt' a lot of the Outlook data be lost in process? I can't imagine that every single field of every contact would be passed through by the Palm sync method.

[dollardr]

As a director of an IT department(and a Pocket PC user) in a large environment, its not easy supporting personally owned PDAs. Take the simple task of connecting your device to a computer, can you imagine trying to support all the different ActiveStink problems on several different types of devices for 100's of users?

The best approach is to get your organization to standardize on one or two manufacturer and get consensus from the top down.

[Thinkingmandavid]

YOu have a few ideas you can use, but I would still try using the usb port.
Getting people higher up using a ppc would of course help your cause and those after you in the long run.
He is also right when he gives his perspective from the IT department. Of course I dont know how many different users would be doing that with pda's, and after all, there is only so many, and they are really variations of each other.
Sounds to me the IT department needs to spread its wings on this one.

[doogald]

I am also the leader of an IT group and we let people use personal PDAs, though we make them aware that we will give any support requests that they have for them low priority. I have my own personal PPC, several folks have personal PalmOS devices, and I once had a Psion PDA - and we have NEVER had a problem caused by HotSync, ActiveSync, or PsiWin.

We have far more problems with people who think that they can install games, screen savers, and the like. PDAs help people become more productive. Why you would not support that I do not understand.

[dollardr]

Actually, we do provide limited support for both Palms and Pocket PC's and setup Intellisync for integration with our e-mail system. We are hoping to implement a standard that will include Pocket PC's as the preferred device and we will probably support models from Dell and HP.

With PC's, we have very good standards in place and we only purchase certain configurations from one vendor. This has greatly reduced our TCO and enables us to provide very efficient support on a 4,000 user network with a limited staff. This isn't as easy to do with personally owned PDA's that employees bring in.

[PPCMD]

I have the same problem. My company does not support PPC and has moved away from any PDA support (many legit reasons). We use Outlook 2000 at work and I have Outlook 2002 (WIN XP Pro) at home and currently include my home email in my meeting requests and tasks. But they only come through as plain text and not as the accept/decline/tentative they normally would come through as.

Any suggestions from you fine PPC and IT pros?

[EnsignRam]

As a director of an IT department(and a Pocket PC user) in a large environment, its not easy supporting personally owned PDAs. Take the simple task of connecting your device to a computer, can you imagine trying to support all the different ActiveStink problems on several different types of devices for 100's of users?

The best approach is to get your organization to standardize on one or two manufacturer and get consensus from the top down.


I would have to agree, supporting personally owned equipment can be quite cumbersome. I have had various users come to me about PDA's, although I officially do not support personally owned PDA's I do make some exceptions.

Just picture users bringing in their own Desktops and Laptops and asking IT to connect them to the LAN.

[Thinkingmandavid]

I understand how they may not want to offer support whether unofficial of not, but as was stated earier, pda's help people to become more productive in certain ways.
organization skills
client info accessible quickly
thoughts and journalizing on the spot
and the list goes on.............
it may be good for IT departments to look at starting support by doing a survey of how/kind of support folks are needing. It doesnt hurt to start at the basics and then move on up.
We all know there is limited resources in certain areas and it just isnt in the IT department.
There must be common ground for both sides.

[TheWolfen]

With my employer, the decision came down from outside IT to simply not support any PDAs at all, and especially not purchase them. I can understand the support issues that led to this decision, and they at least chose to allow the use of PDAs. The reality has become that IT supports them only casually. One of the support guys has a Sony Clie, and helps support them "unofficially." I have a Dell Axim and have provided the unofficial PPC support, although it is totally unrelated to my job. It's actually worked out pretty well, with few major problems.

[JvanEkris]

Well,

There is always not supprted, but tolerated option. I worked in a european goverment body that was extremely tight about this.

They supported palm, but not PocketPC. I talked about this to the head of the IT-department. Explained that having knowledge about competetors of Palm could give him leverage in negotiations with Palm :devilboy:. And that dependency on one supplier (i.e. Palm) would be very bad. Explained that Activesync was a plugin of outlook, with a good trackrecord (i.e. for not demolishing installs), and that if any problems occured i woulld be the one solving them. He agreed on a limited test (i.e me as a test-person).

Based on that experience, he bought an Ipaq himself, and is now slowely deploying them in the organisation for higher-level employees:).

Jaap

[dMores]

if the company is that large, it should have an exchange server.
maybe you can find out if they support remote synchronisation (what palms can do too, i think). so you'd have to connect your cellphone to your pda, dial up and connect to the exchange server and sync this way.

[doogald]

if the company is that large, it should have an exchange server.

As a user of Novell Groupwise, soon to be Lotus Notes, I think that you are wrong about that. "Could have" I can see. "Should have" I disagree with.