Creating Platform Independence For Email, Calendering, Tasking, Etc.

Those of you who are on Mac and PC, on Mac and Linux, or any other exciting constellation will definitely know the hassle of keeping data synchronized. Yet also the poor souls who regularly use more than one computer are aware of the hassle.

For me, both applies and I have been trying to figure out a way to keep my data synchronized. And this the term to generalize the problem… Making my email, calender, tasking, twitter, documents, etc. available not only on multiple machines running several platforms. But also considering that I want to have most of my stuff available offline to be able to work in planes, trains, or where ever.

The solution(s) I implied:

What we want to make available:

• Email - This calls for Gmail(GO!) and it’s awesome and constantly increasing storage capacity. And of course the tremendous amount of nifty features involved like sending from other addresses you own. Using the IMAP protocol you can access your constantly synchronized email from every platform and even make it available offline when using a client like Thunderbird(GO!) . (why Thunderbird? We’ll get to that later)
• Calendering - Google’s Calender (GO!) app scores big time in this case… Multiple calenders, multiple permission settings on what who can read and where.
• Tasking - This is where it gets a bit hairy – since Google Calender does not support task synchronization we have to find a workaround for that one. So we end up using the free version of Remember The Milk(GO!) which we will then integrate into Google Calender later on.
• Twitter(GO!) - Some will refer to it as a useless necessity… but I live there – Hey, be tolerant! And this also calls for some integration obstacles. You can very well use the web based version from pretty much any platform and your cell phone to keep people up to date. But how boring is that please? We want the big boy’s stuff! So we’ll use TwitterFox(GO!) which integrates seamlessly into your Firefox browser.
• Documents - I pretty much have my famous brain farts all day long. Remembering my thoughts always presented a big challenge. Not that my brain capacity would be overrun – but it’s just the mass of things. And of course the desire to make my letters, etc. available anywhere. Hey, who want’s to run around with a laptop all day long? I don’t.
  So this is where we go to Google Docs(GO!) and use their great Google Gears(GO!) (which is by the way is also available to Google Reader(GO!) )
• IM - Something no one really needs. But a great deal to stay in touch with Friends and business collegues. Just make sure that you don’t spread your handles too far as it can very well become a pain in the ass being available all day.
  The problem with IMs though was that in the past – if you’re running more than one system – you had more than one log stored in several places depending on the system or VM you were on.
  The directions we want to go to solve this issue is Meebo.com (GO!) Meebo unifies all your IM accounts to a web based platform and stores logs with all conversation server sided. The consequence being that you have all the data available in one place.
• RSS Feeds – Who can live without them? But the more important question is, who has time to read them while online?
  Google Reader (GO!) takes care of this issue in a very simple way, utilizing Google Gears(GO!), making the last 2000 articles in your favorite feeds available for offline reading.

Putting it all together requires a bit more detailed documentation.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD a detailed, and illustrated 12 page PDF file which will show you step-by-step how to make yourself free from commercial software, costly services and operating systems.