• Your wireless service provider must support OMS. Many do, but not all.

• Your phone must support text messaging, and you must have a service plan that can handle the quantity of text messages OMS will send, at a cost you are willing to bear. I suggest you have a plan that can accommodate an additional 200 text messages per month to be safe (above what you already use monthly).

• You must leave Outlook 2007 running with a live Internet connection. If you shut down the copy of Outlook you installed OMS on or Outlook loses its Internet connection, OMS won't work. I learned this the hard way when I went on a week-long trip, and reflexively shut down my desktop machine on my way out the door. It didn't take too long to figure out why I wasn't getting daily calendar updates (or anything else) from OMS, but by then, it was too late.

Once you install the Outlook Mobile Service add-in, it becomes integrated into Outlook 2007 and adds some new choices to the Tools > Options menu, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


Outlook Mobile Service adds a Mobile section to the Preferences tab. Roll over picture for a larger image.

OMS adds a Mobile section to the Preferences tab of the Options dialog box. Click the Notifications button to control how OMS sends you Reminders and Calendar summaries, as shown in Figure B. You can also specify that OMS forward incoming messages that meet certain criteria to your phone.

FIGURE B


Use this dialog box to tell OMS what information you want delivered to your phone. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Back at the Preferences tab, clicking the Mobile Options button lets you tell OMS whether to send text or multimedia messages to your phone, as Figure C shows. It also lets you specify how many text messages you will get for each Outlook item.

FIGURE C


Tell OMS the format and quantity of text messages to send for each item with this dialog box. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Since text messages are limited to a small number of characters per message, forwarding a good-sized email message using OMS could take dozens of text messages. I stick with one message for each Outlook item to keep the flood of text messages down. If I really need to read the body of a long message or notification, I can find my way to a PC instead of trying to do it on my phone.

Note: If you decide to allow multiple text messages per Outlook item, consider adjusting your mobile service plan to accommodate the increase.

The exception to this is my daily schedule. OMS is smart enough to use however many messages it takes to deliver all relevant schedule items. You don't have to worry about missing a meeting because your whole schedule wouldn't fit into a single text message.

One last thing to be aware of. When OMS sends a text message to your phone, it marks the corresponding Outlook item as "Read." I expected to see items in the Unread Mail folder when I was at my computer, but OMS had read them and sent me messages about them, so they were no longer there. Once I realized this it made sense, but it did throw me at first.