Now that the Phone 7 has launched internationally and now the US I finally have time to blog about all of my adventures in leading application migration experiences from the iPhone over to Phone 7. As the compete lead for Microsoft's Central Region in DPE, I've had the pleasure of seeing some of the best and frankly some of the worst migration experiences in the last 6 months. In this series I will try and share those stories with you from just moving your personal data over to specific application migrations. On the application migration side I will share some of the practices from the trenches that will include items I have learned from user experience mapping to developer to testing to performance tuning.
First however I want a share a few tidbits about data. No I'm not talking about databases; that will come later. I'm talking about YOUR data. How do you get your "stuff" over to from the iPhone and how do you leverage some of the goodies you might not have known existed on the phone 7.
Photos
Some of these tips may be obvious but for the sake of being comprehensive I'm listing all of the ways I have done this in the past. Starting with the least sophisticated. Probably the easiest and quickest way to lift your photos off of your iPhone is email but unless you only have a few photos and they are small enough to fit through whatever size limitations you have with your email provider this is not likely going to be the most efficient way. Secondly and most efficient in my mind is simply to use iTunes for synching photos and video to and from your iPhone and desktop (in my case Windows 7). You can do this manually or automatically just like your music. There are several more convenient apps out there as well that allow you to sync specific documents like photos to and from your desktop using iTunes but that is out of scope in this post.
Once on your desktop you are now open to sync with your Phone 7 using Zune to manually copy or place photos in a folder that is meant to sync automatically. What Phone 7 opens up to you however is several other server based models that allow you keep everything in sync without having to store things on your desktop. This includes SkyDrive and Facebook. All photos uploaded to Facebook from your desktop can now be directly consumed in the photo hub on Phone 7. You can also setup SkyDrive to sync to and from your phone 7. You can then upload new photos from your Phone 7 directly to either SkyDrive or Facebook right from your Phone 7 and back unto your desktop whenever you want. Zune works great but why not use the cloud!
One last and very overlooked server based sync model is OneNote. I love OneNote and on Phone 7 you can setup OneNote (go to all and select refresh to setup the sync with SkyDrive which will create a public web location to begin syncing notes). Then from your desktop you can sync your notes right to your phone. Taken a step further you can "pin" those specific notes right to your start screen. What does this have to do with photos? Well you can add photos to you OneNote as well - another option to lift photos right from your desktop OneNote into your photos folder on Windows 7. Very nice.
Contacts
First off if you are using Exchange with iPhone you can probably skip this section as it already is probably synching your contacts for you which will be brought directly into your Phone 7 once you setup the email account on the phone. Exchange is the master of all your contacts in this case. For other scenarios you can rely on your SIM card. Phones on GSM networks (such as AT&T and T-Mobile) use them and you can use the SIM to save your contacts and import them directly on to your phone. If you received a new SIM card like when you get a smaller SIM going to the iPhone v4 and now you need a bigger SIM going to Phone 7 you can simply sync directly with iTunes which is another hidden but very useful feature of iTunes (local Outlook sync).
Other "Stuff"
Contacts aren't the only thing you can sync with iTunes, you can also sync your email, your bookmarks, and your notes right to Outlook. Once in Outlook you should be good to go on your Phone 7.
In the next posting I'll discuss application migrations - first from a consumer point of view then a developer one. I'll discuss what applications are out there now for Phone 7 and what will be the next wave of applications to expect on the platform. Phone 7 is one of the fastest growing marketplaces but we must give it time to see some of the applications you have grown to expect on the iPhone platform. Phone 7 is merely weeks old but with the likes of FaceBook, Twitter, Xbox Games, and several other top in category applications already in market it will just a matter of time before applications in verticals such as banking and retail start showing up. How do I know? Well I'm in the middle of migrating some of them. Cheers.