Microsoft

After a short reflection, the first thing of task was to backup the exist base setup of the program IncrediMail, so i could always go back, if needed. So i had to know where the data from the program was, therefore i start a short research and found some solutions at the web. Now i had a good breakpoint to start for my original work. After this i search for some existing solutions, which could easily convert an IncrediMail office box to an outlook office box. A few solutions exist, so i had to decide the best of them under the condition to be free. The first of all, was the simplest one, therefore i had to prepare a new Virtual Machine (VM) and install Outlook Express and my Version of IncrediMail.

After this the only thing was to import the folder where the office box was from IncrediMail. So done, i was very happy, this cost me only the time for prepare the VM. After import i had to check, if the data was the same. For this one step was missing, cause the requirement at the end was Outlook 2010. Therefore i had to download the compatibility pack from Microsoft to import the Outlook Express file to the original one. After an deeper comparison, i found out that the messages were successfully imported, but the whole images assigned to this mails were missing. At this point the migration was failed, and i had to try another solution.

The second one was an freeware, which describes my problem. This seems a good solution at first. After downloading and installing, i followed the instruction on the website of the program to convert the office box. After selecting the office box files, the program shows me an error message, that my version of IncrediMail was not supported for this program. I felt bad, so i decide to take a look at the commercial version of another program for converting IncrediMail to Outlook. This program has an restriction in the testversion, that means, it only supports a clearly structure of 10 messages per folder in only one level into deep.

I got into me and thought about a few minutes. After that i had the idea to prepare the original IncrediMail messages into the required structure to convert all at one time. This idea was the gold one, but this had an impact of my progress at all, cause i had to prepare it twice in the end. The conversation of the office box took a long time, cause the office box of my friend was a huge one. After finish of the conversation, I had to prepare the messages back to the original structure. Outlook has a nice function for this requirement, cause i could mark all required messages and move them to the folder i want. At the end it cost me much nerves and some coffee to solve this, from the view of the endpoint, easy task for free.

The exports use a data structure called "Excel Buffer" in Dynamics NAV. All exports fill the "Excel Buffer". If all data has been transfered into the "Excel Buffer" a function will be called which creates a new worksheet in Excel and transfer all the data from the "Excel Buffer" to the worksheet. You can speed up the export if you modify the implementation of the function which transfers the data from the "Excel Buffer" to Excel. Normally empty cells (empty strings, 0, etc.) are transfered. This is not neccessary and takes only time. Additionaly all formating is done for each cell individually when it is transfered. It is faster to transfer the values first and format the worksheet afterwards. These modifications are relatively easy to implement. You can gain even more performance if you do not format the cells individually but connected areas which have the same formats. I would recommend this only as last step if the performance is still not sufficent because this is a lit bit more complex to implement.