A user advised me that they needed data transferred from an old PIM to outlook 2010 when they received a new PC. It was the age of the PIM that surprised me. It was Palm Desktop from about 10 years ago and the challenge was going to be a migration from this to the contacts section of Outlook. The other issue was the fact that the PC in question was currently disconnected from the domain where the exchange mailbox was located. The currently installed version of Outlook was 2003 on the old PC.
So the approach was to create a new profile for outlook with a local pst file. Then using a trial of a product that converts from Palm to Outlook – the contacts section was converted. Obviously if you are doing this regularly you would want a copy of the app – but this is a once off conversion.
Then the contacts section of Outlook was exported to a pst file and then zipped for onwards transfer to the new machine. A simple import from file in Outlook 2010 and setting it not to created duplicates allowed the data to be imported and checked.
Result – a happy user who doesn’t have to re-enter 500 contacts.