About Wayland Bruns

Wayland founded CompanionLink in 1987 as The Jorf Company, a maker of shareware 4gl products. As a leading maker of CRM Add-On products, the company started with Sync Products in 1996 for the PalmPilot. As CEO of CompanionLink, Wayland strives to balance quality customer service, products with good value, low prices, and a positive workplace..

DejaOffice Contact Widget – All your Contacts on your Android Home Screen

Posted on July 9, 2017 by Wayland Bruns

I was talking to my developer about the limits of Android Widgets. A widget uses Android memory to store stock data. Since Android 3.0 we’ve been able to scroll widgets. This allows us to store more data than shows on the screen, allowing you to scroll to see it all.

I asked him what the limit was.

My developer didn’t know.

So I said “Let’s try making a contacts widget.”

“For what contacts?” he asks.

“All of them”, I answer.

So he does!

DejaOffice for Android now gives you an Android Desktop widget that shows All of your DejaOffice contacts. Whether that is 300, or 3000 or 30,000, they are all there.

From the Desktop Widget, you can dial the phone, email or text any contact on your list. All without opening any apps. Give it a try!

From Android Desktop, Long Press to get the menu for Widgets. Select DejaOffice. Select Contacts View 4×4. Place it on your desktop. On most phones you can resize this to be any size you find convenient.

DejaOffice also provides widgets for Month View, Today, Tasks, and Memos.

Sync Galaxy S8 to Outlook without using Exchange

How to Sync Galaxy J3, J5 and J7 (2017) to Outlook

Posted on June 12, 2017 by Wayland Bruns

If you need Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes on your Galaxy J3, J5 or J7 (2017) phone, you can easily and securely sync using the DejaOffice App (free) by CompanionLink Software.

DejaOffice and CompanionLink for Galaxy J3, J5 and J7 (2017)

CompanionLink offers several secure sync methods; USB Sync (most secure), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and DejaCloud sync. You do not need an Office 365 Account to use DejaOffice and CompanionLink. All you need is Outlook and your Phone.

Why you need a Smart Switch alternative

Samsung has a generic utility called Smart Switch, and in the past offered Samsung Kies to sync with Galaxy S5. These are very basic programs that do not work well. You can read about these problems here, here, and here. You can also read about one USATODAY.com editor’s experience using Kies.

If you value your Outlook data, sanity, or just need a solution that works out of the box with the new Galaxy phone, try CompanionLink. It’s been downloaded more than 1.2 million times and is the #1 independent PC suite for Android sync with Outlook.

Why you need an Outlook App alternative

Microsoft now sells the Outlook App. To use it requires a Business license to Office 365. The App is still in it’s early phase. Microsoft just added the ability to Edit a Contact record. With DejaOffice you can add and edit contacts, select categories with colors, and synchronize tasks including recurring tasks.

DejaOffice includes Widgets . A widget is an active screen that sits on your Android desktop. The most poweful widget is the DejaOffice Contact Widget which shows all of your contacts. Now you can scroll and dial without opening any App. The DejaToday widget shows today’s schedule, Agenda and Tasks, so you can quickly see your schedule.

To create a widget for DejaToday on your Android desktop, find an empty space on the desktop, press and hold for about 1-2 seconds.

Tap the ‘Widgets’, select “DejaOffice”, then select between the DejaToday, DejaCalendar, DejaContacts, DejaTasks, or DejaMemos Widgets.

Your options for Galaxy J3, J5 and J7 (2017) Outlook sync

CompanionLink’s configuration lets you choose which Outlook data to sync. Toggle Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, and Journal. Advanced data such as Categories will also sync so you have the same data sets and view options on your Galaxy as you do in Outlook. Choose from two-way sync or limit it to just one-way transfer. You can even select the sync direction (Outlook > S5, or S5 > Outlook).

If you have multiple Outlook PST files and folders, you can select which to sync. Let’s say you have an iPad and use iCloud to keep it synchronized with Outlook. Your Outlook client will have your default Outlook Contacts/Calendar folder (PST file) as well as a separate iCloud Contacts/Calendar folder (PST file). The iCloud folder is installed by default when you install the iCloud software from Apple. It’s important that you are able to choose the right Outlook folders to sync with Galaxy S5 so you do not accidentally mix data (such as personal data with business data).

You can choose which specific Outlook Categories to sync with S5. Many professionals store leads and clients in the same Outlook Contacts file under different categories. Or, they store Personal and Business data under two categories. It’s important to use a PC sync suite with the flexibility to select which Categories to synchronize with your Galaxy S5.

You can pick how you want to synchronize. CompanionLink allows sync to Galaxy S5 over USB, WiFi, DejaCloud, and using a Gmail account. Each sync method has its merits; click here for a complete discussion on this. No other Android Outlook app offers this breadth of sync options to fit the needs for security and convenience.

Someone to call in case you need help

CompanionLink extends free phone support and email support to Galaxy S5 owners. Visit this page for help if you need to speak with us.

CompanionLink also has step-by-step guides to configure each type of synchronization:

You can also purchase a $49 RunStart package that schedules time with a CompanionLink technician who will log into your PC and set up the synchronization. This guarantees a correctly configured Galaxy S5 to PC sync and the peace of mind knowing your Outlook database isn’t being accidentally corrupted.

Google Sync with Outlook

Posted on June 8, 2017 by Wayland Bruns

Let’s face it. The PC is still faster than the Web! Entering quick info on the PC, will be faster than loading a Web App like Google Calendar every time.I took a phone call today. I need to find a bit of info, and call the customer back tomorrow. So I set a quick reminder on my Calendar for 10am tomorrow to call. How do I get that to my phone?

My phone is my essential reminder tool. I absolutely depend on the alarms there to remind me what to do throughout my day. The phone automatically synchronizes to Google. So it works fine if I made the appointment in Google.

But I didn’t make the appointment in Google. To do that means launching my browser, log into Google, search for Calendar, decide which calendar, and then adding an entry. I don’t have time for that.

The best way to go from Outlook to Google is CompanionLink for Google. It’s easy to set up, and completely automatic. I don’t even press a sync button. Just make the change in outlook, and it is automatically sent to Google. With CompanionLink, you don’t even need to open Google. When I make an appointment on the phone, it moves back to Outlook automatically.

CompanionLink for Google is $49.95. Use the affinity code “BLOG” to get $10 off. You can download it right now and run a two-week trial. The trial has 100% of the features.

Google Sync (the native sync to Android and iPhone) is great for Contacts and Calendar. If you also use Tasks, Category Colors, or Notes, then we recommend using a dedicated App on our phone called DejaOffice. Click on that link for more information.

How to Connect Outlook 365 to Google for $5 per month, Contacts, Calendar and Tasks, without downloading anything!

Posted on May 9, 2017 by Wayland Bruns

Office 365 Outlook is in the Cloud. Google is in the Cloud. So why don’t they connect?

There’s no reason to download software and install it on your computer. If you need Outlook Cloud connected to Google Cloud, the service should be in the Cloud!

CompanionLink provides an automated connection service from Microsoft Office 365 Outlook to Google. It synchronizes Contacts, Calendar and Tasks.

You can set it up in about five minutes.

It is free to set up. If you have under 400 records, it is free to use. FOREVER.

If you have more records, we charge less than $5 per month. Just select a payment option as you set it up.

Here are the steps:

1. Create an account on DejaOffice CRM Live.

Go to DejaOffice CRM Live

Create an Account

2.Select the “Settings” tab (the bottom one).

3. Set up your Google and Outlook accounts

4. If you have more have more than 400 records (contacts plus calendar),you will want to set up a payment option. Options are $14.95 for three months, or $99.95 for two years.

That’s all! Once you have set up, your accounts should synchronize within about 15 minutes. They will continue to sync automatically.

Here’s a link to our setup guide:
How to Connect Google with Office 365 using DejaCloud Connector

If you have any questions, you can call CompanionLink Support. They’ll help you out.

How to synchronize Outlook Category Colors through Google Sync for your Android and iPhone

Posted on May 9, 2017 by Wayland Bruns

Download CompanionLink for Google
Set it to sync from Outlook
Set it to sync your Google Contacts and Calendar
On Android and iPhone set Google Sync.

I love category colors. As a business person; green appointments mean money, red are urgent, yellow are cautious. I use purples and blues for personal and recreational stuff. When I glance at my day, or my week, it’s the colors that I see, not the text.

We were “in the room” when Google created Google Calendar. That is; we were one of the companies chosen to see the “secret beta” back in 2006. This was months before the Calendar was available to the public. It was a lot of fun to go to Google’s campus and to get the secret information. What was not fun at all was understanding the level of inexperience Google had with PC office calendars.

In 2006, PC Outlook had been out for nine years, Microsoft Schedule Plus for about nine years before that. Polaris Packrat was in full swing back in 1986, and in 1984 I remember Commence had a great Calendar for Windows. One would have thought that Google would take advantage of all these past Calendar products, and base their new offering on them.

Nope! Google is a linux shop! Linux people always seem to want to create everything from scratch. So Google Calendar emerged with its own new way of handling recurring events, folders, and categories. It had few of the capabilities that PC calendars of that era offered. It was a huge up for them to climb to add revision after revision for things that everyone could already do 20 years before on PCs.

One of those things is Category Colors. Outlook ties colors to different categories. So my business appointments are one color, and personal appointments are a different color. Google first tied colors to different calendars, and then added a secondary color attribute.

CompanionLink for Google handles category colors well. If you need your Outlook colors on your Samsung Galaxy Phone, or your iPhone 7, then a great way to move them is with CompanionLink for Google.

While Outlook associates colors with a Category, in Google it simply shows with a color “dot” on our main Google Calendar.

If you want to see colors on your Android phone, or your iPhone, use the Google App on the phone. This will Google Sync from your Google Calendar, and it will include the colors.

CompanionLink for Google is $49.95 and available for download now. You can get set up in about 15 minutes. Thanks for reading!

Wayland Bruns, CTO
CompanionLink Software, Inc.

Secure Contact Sync without Google or Exchange

Posted on May 5, 2017 by Wayland Bruns

This week brought us news of a clever phishing scheme using Google Docs. People received a realistic email from a trusted business associate. The email contained a link to a Google Doc. Opening the document required you go through Google OAuth and entering your Email and Password.

Fortunately, Google OAuth is secure, so the password was not stolen. Unfortunately, the phisher obtained a token that allowed them to access your gmail account, allowing them to send an email to all of your professional contacts.

This attack underscores a weak point in data security. When your email and contact information is stored on a public cloud server, the server becomes a target for obtaining your valuable information. Instead of targeting the billions of computers that are used to store business information locally, phishers target the “big three” who collect the data in complex systems that allow others access to it.

Notwithstanding the phishing attack, Google, Microsoft and Apple reserve the right to farm your data and re-sell it. Google will scan your data and target advertising to you. If you send an email about an Acapulco vacation, you will soon find your browsing full of offers for cheap resorts. Microsoft and Apple are more circumspect about their data scanning. But they still store and mine the data, and work to derive profit from it.

CompanionLink provides a secure alternative to storing your company’s data on a highly public server. If you use our USB, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth Sync, your data is not stored at all. We offer a secure cloud service called DejaCloud. This service is significantly different from Exchange, iCloud and Google Sync. With DejaCloud, we do not derive income from mining and selling the data. Our source of income is product sales and subscription service, and that’s all. We are not a public company and do not have to split our loyalty between our customers and our shareholders.

I remember years ago how proud I was as my customer list grew from 500 contacts, to 600, and then over one thousand. At that time I was using Goldmine, and we sold Add-On products for Act! and Goldmine. Today we have 1.8 million entries in our various databases, and I’m still proud that this list has never been hacked, and will never be stored in a public database.

How to Sync Samsung Galaxy S8 with Outlook

Posted on April 17, 2017 by Wayland Bruns

(And have it look like Outlook on the Phone)

Download DejaOffice on your phone, and CompanionLink for Outlook on your PC.
Configure them for DejaCloud Sync
Watch your Outlook Contacts and Calendar appear on your phone.

DejaOffice is Free. CompanionLink runs on a two-week trial.

Sync Galaxy S8 to Outlook without using Exchange

I think our Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus will be arriving tomorrow! Like many of you I can’t wait. I carried a Galaxy Note 7 for a month before it was recalled. The size and shape was really nice. Narrower and taller than my Galaxy Note 4, but very slim and nice to hold. I do a lot of business on my phone, emails, tasks, stocks, so I really like the large screen.

Like most business people, I do nearly all my data entry on my desktop PC. That’s where I handle my task list, enter appointments, and add new contacts. If I’m out and about I use my phone to complete tasks, add new tasks and schedule things. So it’s a constant battle to keep my phone and my PC showing the same data.

That battle is eliminated using CompanionLink and DejaOffice.

DejaOffice is hands-down the best Outlook-like App for the phone. It has the “classic 4”: Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Memos, just like an old Palm OS device. More important, it has all the Outlook fields, and all the Outlook Calendar formations. Android OS comes from Google, which is a Linux shop. Even Google management does not use Outlook. It shows. You can’t schedule an appointment for every weekday in Android, and they don’t have a native task app.

Special features of DejaOffice:

Time zone management, so when you land your Calendar doesn’t go wonky
Calendar Colors that match Outlook
Recurring tasks compatible with Outlook
Optional: Franklin Covey task priorities A1, B2, C99
Works same on Android and iPhone, Phones and Tablets.

DejaOffice will connect to your PC using USB (remember old Hotsync?), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and DejaCloud. DejaCloud Realtime Sync is quick to set up and amazingly fast. I can make an appointment on my PC, and by the time I pick up my phone it is already there. It works when I’m on a trip without any problems.

Let’s get started! It’s going to be a great year for phone releases.

CompanionLink featured in New York Times print edition

Posted on May 8, 2016 by Wayland Bruns

The print edition of The New York Times, page 89, featured CompanionLink! Wow!

The article Keeping Your Android Files in Sync With a Computer mentions CompanionLink along with several free options like Google Sync (which does not sync to your PC) and DropBox which does not synchronize Contacts or Calendar.

“I’m really happy to see our name in print”, says Wayland Bruns, CTO of CompanionLink software. “We are the only product mentioned that uses a traditional business model. We offer paid software with associated service like free telephone technical support.”

CompanionLink fully understands that not everyone is a technical genius, able to pull together multiple free solutions to make a seamless solution. Sometimes the best value in software tools is finding a tool that comes with the service needed to make it smooth and effortless.

Many thanks to D.J. Biersdorfer for recognizing us in print!

How to Sync Samsung Galaxy S7 to Outlook and Office 365

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Wayland Bruns

We got our Galaxy S7 Edge today. Nice phone. The graphics are great. The phone is light. The curved edges are awesome.

These large screen phablet phones are perfect for the DejaOffice for Outlook App. There’s a lot of useful space to do important things.

The Google App and Outlook App both waste this space by using lots of white space. Our goal here at CompanionLink is to pack the space with data. The phone list on DejaOffice features your contact name, company name, email, phone number and category, and that’s just on the list. For tasks DejaOffice shows category, completed status, subject, due date, email or location. The Outlook App and Google App don’t even have tasks!

How to Sync Galaxy S7 with Outlook

On your PC or Mac; Download the CompanionLink for Outlook 14-day trial
On your iPhone or Android phone, download DejaOffice for Outlook
Set up USB, Wi-Fi or DejaCloud sync

That’s it! You’ll have your data on your phone. For more information here’s our info page for CompanionLink for Outlook.

Call us at 503-243-3400 if you need further help.

CompanionLink provides free technical support to everyone with a Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge phone, regardless of whether you do or do not own a license to CompanionLink . You can also access our setup guides online. If you want an advanced configuration help, we offer a $49 RunStart package where our experts will log in to your PC and Galaxy S7 to configure the sync for you. This gives you the peace of mind that your Galaxy S7 Outlook sync is fine-tuned to match your needs.

Sync Outlook for Mac 2011 – Contacts and Calendar – with El Capitan

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Wayland Bruns

CompanionLink has an offer for people who have upgraded to El Capitan.

Apple’s updates always seem to break old things. In this case, there are field reports that Exchange Contact and Calendar sync from Outlook for Mac 2011 is not working with El Capitan, Mac OS X 10.11.

CompanionLink for Mac is working fine. So if you need your Contacts and Calendar updated in a jiffy, maybe it’s time to switch from Exchange sync to CompanionLink.

We have two routes to do this. One is to install CompanionLink for Mac, and synchronize to Google, and set your iPhone, iPad or Android phone to sync with Google. This is a great solution if you only need Contacts and Calendar. As you can see, Calendar colors are supported by CompanionLink’s Google Sync.

The better method is to download the DejaOffice for Outlook App onto your phone, and synchronize using DejaCloud sync. This is a direct sync from your Outlook for Mac 2011, and Outlook for Mac 2016 to DejaCloud and instantly to DejaOffice on your phone. DejaCloud sync handles Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes. It handles your calendar colors. It has a lot of advanced features like templates that make adding new events and tasks ultra easy, and mapping capabilities to map nearby contacts and map your calendar events. Check it out!

CompanionLink for Mac runs $49.95 and has a two week free trial. You can save $10 today by using the code “BLOG” in the Affinity Code field of your purchase, making CompanionLink for Mac just $39.95. Or for free, you can just start with the trial. Who knows, maybe Apple will fix the El Capitan problem in the next two weeks!

Small Business Productivity, Tools and Tips – Android and iPhone Sync

Author Archives: Wayland Bruns