When it rains it pours Outlook issues. A few weeks ago I was working with a customer that was having an issue where a small handful of users were loosing the custom categories they applied to their categories. The problem – based on my experiences – seems to be caused by having iCloud sync for contacts turned on in the iPad, but also pulling the contacts from your Exchange account. At some point I think a restore happens or some automatic sync correction ends up wiping the categories away also updating all the contacts in Exchange, therefore Outlook…

In the end, it is ALWAYS good to have a backup of you contacts. and as it turns out this customer did – albeit they were 6 months old. The problem was that the “decategoried” contacts they had in Outlook were fairly updated with notes, changed e-mail and phone numbers, versus the properly categorized backup’s that were 6 months old. Enter the tool…

While on-site I developed the tool to resolve this problem for their users. It might be useful for others, so that is why I posted it on CodePlex:

https://olcontactcorrecttool.codeplex.com/

But, I think it is also a good example/sample of how to access Outlook from an external application, iterate through a folder and compare items in Outlook. So the source code is available too.