Head in the clouds…
So I have received confirmation from OMF that I will be heading out in November (assuming there are no problems between now and then!). It’s pretty much certain really!
In preemptive preparation I have been doing a bit of organising etc. Today I got Office 2007 (Can’t find the discs for the student edition of 2003 I bought, so I’m taking the excuse!). I got the “home and student” edition simply because it is ridiculously cheaper than the other versions, and was glad to find it has powerpoint (the home version didn’t have power point when my brother got it, or when my dad got it…hmmm) but also found it didn’t include outlook. Now this is no big loss. I had used Outlook for my calendar with it syncing to my phone and, recently, my iPod Touch but thought it would be a simple matter of telling things to sync to Windows Calendar or something. No such luck! For all their ease of use and anti-Microsoft following, Apple have decided that the iPod and iPhone can only sync with Outlook (2003 SP1 and above). So I started to dig!
While digging I realised that I should get all my contacts together and store them safely (having experienced the misery and difficulty that missionaries experience when their harddisk or similar crashes and contacts are lost or even just temporarily unavailable for a week or two). I reckoned that a cloud solution may be what I’m looking for. I already use GMail and Google Reader, and am quite fond of the intrusive, privacy neglecting, big G so seeing as they already know everything about my email and browsing habits, I may as well give them my contacts (most are already in GMail) and calendar too!
While scouring the net for potential, I happened upon this nifty site which can be used to set up an in-the-cloud Exchange service that is able to provide Exchange style access to (among others) Google’s online services, designed specifically to give people mobile access to these services through Windows mobile and Apple handheld devices. It’s in beta at the moment and can allow pushing of calendar and contacts, with plans to introduce email making use of GMail’s IMAP service. Once set up I can access my google calendar and contacts direct from my iPhone syncing via Wifi and no need for Outlook or other expensive stuff!
Following that success I decided to look into laptop access. So that I can still get at my calendar on my PC, make appointments, get contact info etc when I’m not in range of a usable hotspot. So I tried a few things, mostly unsuccessful, until coming around to something I should have thought of at the start. Mozilla Thunderbird. Well truthfully I downloaded Mozilla Sunbird and set it up for my google calendar (with the relevant addons) then downloaded Thunderbird to do contacts (and IMAP gmail… maybe…) and realised I should just use the Lightning extension with Thunderbird. So I did that. And it works!
So now my calendar and complete contacts have joined my email in the Cloud! But I still have a synchronising copy of each on my laptop! Marvellous…
Tags: calendar, cloud, contacts, email, gmail, iPhone, ipod touch, japan, nuevasync, office 2007, OMF, outlook, push