I am not sure if I have mentioned that I love it when I can sync all of my information. I have my work computer, and home computers, my phone address book and calendar, and on top of that I would like to be able to view them all if I have to access them on the web somewhere without any of those devices. It can be hard to find ways to make everything play nicely together when A) they are all different operating systems, and B) they are different types of devices. I was trying to explain how I had all of this rigged up to Mario and even I got confused when I was telling him how I got things from one place to another. So I drew him a picture, which needs some explaining I figure.
Blue Arrows To sync my contacts i have up to this point been using Plaxo. I started using it because it was the only thing I could find that would sync my contacts from Outlook to Thunerbird. This was nice because I was able to finally get my contacts on both my home and work computers (Figure A).
Then I started to yearn (yes YEARN) for a way to sync my work calendar to my home computer (and someday to my phone). I could get my calendar up to Plaxo from Outlook which at the time supported only a few source of incoming information. And then maybe about a year and a half ago they changed up the way they did things and started to work towards functioning as a hub of all your information.
What they realized was that people have contacts and calendars that are scattered all over the place. And in order to entice people to use their service they started adding Sync Points. These are different sources that you can sync to and from. These include: Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, Windows Mobile, Mac OS X and a few other mail programs.
In addition they added the ability to aggregate alot of the social networking things that poeple are interested in like Myspace, Twitter, Digg, Pownce as well as the ability to add blogs that you follow and have all the recent stuff show up all together. The idea is that they want to become a hub for all of your information. (some say thats good some say not so much, I guess it just depends on your take)
GREEN ARROWS) At the same time that Plaxo is upgrading their services, Lightning for Thunderbird came along. Plaxo never made a way to sync with the Lightning plug in so I had to figure out another way to get my calendar info up to Plaxo. And like an answer to my prayers (if I prayed) Provider for Google Calendar came along (Figure B). This allows a BIDIRECTIONAL sync with Google, and you can add as many of your Google Calendars to your Thunderbird calendar as you might want. Awesome, I love it it works great! (If you are using the latest version of Ubuntu, Google provider .4 doesn’t work with Lightning .7, and Lightning .8 is not yet working on it.)
So the way that I have this set up in Plaxo, is that my main Google calendar syncs to the main Plaxo Calendar, which then syncs with outlook. For other calendars such as Mario’s and my shared home calendar I have that just syncing to the places that I have Thunderbird installed.
Figure C) And then you add in the Phone, because there is always a phone, especially since I am a phone NERD. My syncing life became a whole lot easier when I got my Blackberry Curve (8320 T-Mobile) last October. I was excited because I could at least access Google Calendar from the BB web browser and it would show me all my calendars in the Agenda View. You could also add a quick event. Just type in, “Meet Joe, tomorrow at 5pm” and it would enter it into your default calendar. However things got a much sweeter when Google introduced apps specifically for the Blackberry which included Google Sync. It puts your google calendars INTO the native blackberry calendar so you don’t have to be connected to the web at all times. Additionally when you add an appointment to your calendar it gets added to your default google calendar. (WHo knows though, if enough people complain maybe it will get changed. When this works it works great.Lately I have been getting an error message that it can’t connect to the server, but I sort of think that is my phones fault, or that I messed with something else on my phone that messed with the way this program works. You can set it so that it automatically syncs your calendars which if you have a limited data plan you may not want to do. You can also set it so that you have to start the sync.
As for Contacts to the phone, the only way I know of so far is to connect to the BB software that you get with the phone that will sync between Outlook and blackberry. Its not perfect, but it works. It just means that from time to time I have to make the effort to sync my contacts with my work machine.
So for the moment, that is how I get my information to look similar in all places. When it works it works really great. Google is doing wonderful things with the calendars and access. Now if they could do something about adding tasks to their calendars I would be even happier. But I really appreciate what they have been up to lately. And since I have a blackberry I especially love that they have made sure that several of their most important apps work well on the phone.
I hope that this process could be streamlined soon. Google can now sync calendars to Outlook but I have not yet tried it. If they could do something with the contacts, and make things work with thunderbird and phone address books then holy shit they would totally rock my world.
If anyone has any suggestions on ways to streamline this I would love to hear them. I am always on the lookout for new and exciting ways to get things done in a more streamlined manner. (Oh and free and or Open Source)
