Sync Tank brainstorming – you are the center

04Oct08

You are the hub! The groups, organisations, devices and applications orbit around you. So the design of syncing calendar and contacts should reflect that.  Either you choose a device which is very portable and that you use most of the time or you choose a virtual center of these two resources on the web, your time management and your contacts.  

There is no one-for-all sync solution if connecting

• mobile devices
• computers (incl notebooks)
• web applications

In this case it’s the smartphone, the laptop and a Google account. 

The web is the new center

Until recently the personal computing device was the center, the hub all synchronisation refers to.  That is increasingly less the case, the center is shifting to the web application, in our case Google apps. (BTW: the PC based sync center was an expensive nightmare for IT departments due to the variety of devices, OSes and technologies as well as the decentralised service requirements)

That shift to the web sounds trivial, but is consequential: if you interconnect your mail, calendars and contacts, you shouldN’t double synchronisation, meaning you synch your computer(s) with Google accounts, your computer(s) to the device(s) and your device(s) with Google.  Simple law of complexity and slightly different formats turn that into a never ending problem.

So the best center for synching is the web app, in our case Google Apps (or your private Google Account). As the center of coordination is YOU,  I would recommend the personal web place as the center for calendaring and contacts.  And as of now a personal Google account seems to be a good choice.  Gmail is ubiquitous through POP3, IMAP and mobile tools, calendaring offers categorised calendars and offers various ways of combinations.  Google contacts could be better, but is good enough to serve as basis. Google offers some sync apps and services as do various 3rd party products.

If you are member of one or more Google Apps domains, I would try to use those as being on the peripherie of your core personal account. Gmail allows to use POP3 on Google Apps, you can even send emails with a different domain after mutually certifying “ownership” of the email address.

The phone could be a center

For Blackberry or iPhone addicts, the new enter might be the mobile device, but again, we change devices pretty quickly usually every 2 years or faster, would you want to change all config every few months?

Pros

• we tend to have the smartphone wherever we go
• calendaring and addressbook are usually quite good
• Syncing is part of the core functionality

Cons

• Lifecycle of a phone (system, tools, apps)
• Sometimes calendars don’t offer categorisation
• Some proprietary sync solutions
• Some incompatibility issues / OS preferences
• Direct syncing to web is still “unusual”

 

The choice of the mobile phone though influences a lot the ease of synchronisation. Blackberry is Mac neutral, in order to sync the Blackberry to the Mac, you need to by 3rd party tools.  iPhone is Linux unfriendly, or better, unfriendly to anything which can’t run iTunes. Nokia is more Mac friendly, tends to get better for Linux, but updates of phone software need a Windows PC.  There are no great other Smartphones out there, they mostly use either Windows Mobile (arrgghh), or don’t have a nice keyboard (some Linux based smartphones), or use outdated OSes like PalmOS (some Treos).

Most users would sync their smartphone first to the PC/Mac.  And then the PC/Mac to the web apps. This is becoming archaic in the days of mobile phone flat rates and the always online mode. Therefore we would recommend to scrutinise your phone choice regarding the web sync possibilities.

The PC / laptop shouldn’t be your center

What exactly is sync relevant on your computer?  Outlook / Entourage, Thunderbird, Mac Mail / iCal / Address, or even Lotus Notes, Exchange, SAP, CRM…  Exactly, too many choices, what if you want to switch applications? Second problem: most powerful sync tools for your desktop cost money or they are only good at one specific aspect of synchronisation.

And then there are apps like iTunes.  I love iTunes, but… it is proprietary, doesn’t run on Linux for example (only as a virtual Windows app), so unless there is a virtual web based iTunes, the iPhone / Mac can only be solution if you have the right equipment (Mac of course, Windows is second best) and if you follow the old PC / Mac centric syncing doctrine.

Remember the “mayday, mayday we are sinking” advertising clip.  The response in our case is not the germanic response “what are you sssinking about”, but “what are you syncing with”

So when we think about synchronisation, we should forget about the PC / Mac as the center of our universe.

Filed under: Best Practice, Collaboration, How Tos, Productivity, Web Services   |  1 Comment
Tags: Gmail, Google Account, Google Apps, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, sync, sync tools, synchronisation