March 15, 2009

This has been my goal since the day I first started seriously toying with the notion of switching to a WinPho. I have always admitted to hating Outlook, even though I really can’t explain why. I prefer my email viewed in Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird actually gives me far more control over the layout. I liked using the Palm Desktop for my contacts and calendar: more precisely, I preferred using Agendus. Iambic offers an Outlook version of Agendus, but it’s still just Outlook with a pretty wrapper.

So what changed? As most of you know, my love of Agendus was so great, that about a year ago Iambic invited me to join their forum support team. This means that every day I read through the Iambic forums, trying to help people solve their frustrations. And then, two days ago, I found this thread. The current solution is not free, although I suspect with the current race to the cloud, there will be alternatives popping up right and left. In the meanwhile, this one works quite well.

Ingredients:

1 WinPho

1 or more Google calendar

1 Goosync subscription

1 free copy of the Palm desktop

1 copy of CompanionLink (Express or Pro, depending on your needs and wallet)

The major expense of this undertaking is the cost of CompanionLink ($49.95 for the Express version, and $99.95 for the Pro version). Goosync is a subscription based service. It also has 2 versions: free and Premium. For what we want to do here, you really need the Premium subscription at £19.95/year. (The free version only syncs your calendar, not contacts or tasks.)

The only major drawback of this whole procedure is that Goosync doesn’t currently support categories. So if this is a major concern for you, you might want to just stick with (yech, ptooie!) Outlook. However, since I’ve brought this up, there is at least a work around to calendar categories (although it’s more work than I’m willing to do). Just set up multiple calendars: one labeled “work,” one labeled “personal” – you get the idea.

Goosync Premium will also do automatic syncs, so it nicely takes the place of an exchange server. So once you have Goosync all set up, your WinPho is in sync with Google. Here comes the secret sauce. All you have to do now is install CompanionLink and set it up to sync your Google account with the Palm desktop. It really is that easy. You do not have to plug your WinPho into your computer to sync – ever again. The one reason you might want the Pro version of CompanionLink over the Express version is the automatic sync. Why leave anything to chance? Yes, $99.95 is expensive, but it means you’ll never again have to wonder if you’ve done a sync. And more importantly, you’ll never again have to open Outlook, and you can go back to that nice Palm desktop (or Agendus!) interface.

As brilliant and seamless as this all appears, I must admit that I’m also using Microsoft’s My Phone beta to sync my pim data. I like to keep my options open. I also like knowing that I have lots of backups of my pim data.

What’s that? How do you deal with those programs that have desktop components that need to be synchronized? Of course I’ve thought of that, gentle reader! And that’s where Microsoft’s Live Mesh comes in. That takes some juggling, but once your data files are properly located and placed, you have access to the same data on your device and your pc.

We are going head first into the cloud, but we are not going without plenty of backup on the ground!

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