Synchronize Outlook Tasks with Remember the Milk

April 14, 2008

Outlook 2007 is by far the best integrated solution for organizing your life. You can drag an email to the calendar and voila you got an appointment linked to the email message. You can flag an email and it becomes a task/to-do item. You can categorize/tag emails, tasks, appointments and contacts. Everything just works. The only problem is it is tied to one machine and there is no easy way to keep the same information on your desktop, work pc and laptop without an exchange server.

I use Gmail through IMAP so my emails are synced. I use Google’s calendar sync, so my calendar is synced with Google’s calendar. I sync with my iPhone, so my contacts are synced but there is no way to sync my tasks. So, I wrote this simple tool to sync to Remember the Milk (RTM) task manager with Outlook tasks. It is not 100% working yet and has some bugs, so I decided to release as open source and hopefully someone will start hacking at it and take it to the finish line.

The project is released under the Microsoft-Pl license. I have no idea what that means, I just picked a license from the list. It was all Greek to me.

You can find the source code and more information at http://www.codeplex.com/rtmos

I hope that helps and let me know if you have questions understanding my self-explaining, self-healing, undocumented code and remember they are not bugs, they are undocumented features ;)

PS: This is the first time I release an open source project, so let me know if I am doing something wrong.

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Posted in My Projects, Open Source
Tags: Open Source, outlook, remember the milk, rtm, sync, utilities

Viewing 8 Comments

Oscar Kafati 4 months ago 1 point
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This is awesome - lot s and lots of people have been asking for an Outlook/Remember the Milk Sync. I downloaded your code but I'm pretty clueless about what to do next. Do I need to get a copy of Microsoft Visual Basic to run this? Thanks

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Emad Ibrahim 4 months ago 1 point
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@Oscar the utility as it is right now is not for "consumers" it is more of a technical preview and you need to be a programmer and have visual studio to be able to compile it and run it. I am hoping someone in the community will volunteer and create an installer for everyone to use. Stay tuned and I will announce any updates here.

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Oscar Kafati 4 months ago 1 point
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Thanks Emad. My development days are over so I'll sit tight and look forward to someone creating the installer. In the meantime, I've started syncing with Outlook indirectly via MilkSync to get RTM tasks on my mobile which I then sync up with Outlook.

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tomas 3 months ago 1 point
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Just curious, but the code at codeplex, does not contain the referenced RTMnet.dll - is this anywhere else to be found?

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Emad Ibrahim 3 months ago 1 point
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@tomas: thanks for pointing this out. I have uploaded that dll to codeplex as a patch. You can get it at http://www.codeplex.com/rtmos/SourceControl/Pat...

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http://www.emadibrahim.com

David Sheardown 4 weeks ago 1 point
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Hi guys,
I was too looking all over to get something that sync's outlook with RTM.. although for the life of me I cannot get SMS messages nor MSN messenger updates from RTM! I'm on virginmobile in Australia.

Anyway to the point!
Thanks for kicking this off, really great. I am a developer in .NET/C# and so on, and ironically I started (almost finished!) a task add-in for outlook that uses a local (Oz) SMS service (SMSglobal) so you can get SMS updates on tasks due etc... I still think using RTM is a better option as there are many other options, so I am happy to take a look at the code and help!

Let you know how I go!

Thanks again for kicking off!

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KR 3 weeks ago 1 point
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Any updates on this from Any Good Samaritans!!!
I badly need this utility to sync my RTM items with my Outlook.

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aethiolas 3 days ago 1 point
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I've just picked up your source and I'm gonna start looking over it prob in the next week, maybe I can push this on a little bit!

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