Solo Technology

I currently use Windows on my laptop and use MS Outlook for email and calendar. I kinda have to since I like to sync with my PocketPC and Outlook is the only game in town.

My wife uses Yahoo and keeps her calendar online there. To keep life simple, I use Yahoo’s Intellisync (free and I’d provide a link but you apparently have to sign in first) to sync HER calendary to MY calendar (or verce-visa). Works tolerably well.

My employer is Exchange based, so we all use Outlook there as well. Works well for scheduling meetings and such - if people use their Exchange calendar you can avoid scheduling meetings for times that are already booked.

Keeping my laptop and work schedules in sync has proven to be a bit of a pain in the butt. In fact, to do it I sync all my work stuff to the wife’s Yahoo calendar (again with Intellisync), then go do the same thing from my laptop. If laptop had changes, I do it again from my work PC. OMG, some days it’s hardly worth the effort - but that’s the only way I’m going to get my work meetings onto my PDA. Well, unless I start syncing the PDA to the work machine - which is a strong possibility if/when I make this laptop a linux machine again.

Oh, but that has wrinkles too…

If I take this thing to linux I’ll basically be hosed on the calendar. I’ve looked at Mozilla’s Sunbird project, but it doesn’t really have anything that will sync with Outlook as near as I can tell. So.. to have a synced calendar on my linux machine, I guess I’d have to see if I can synch one Yahoo Calendar to another Yahoo Calendar or something hokey like that.

Very Annoying.

I have servers available to me (like the one that hosts this whine-fest!) - I just wanna be able to put some software on it and use it from any of my machines. I’m now contemplating just building my own little web application for that. But then… bah, I’m back to how do I sync it to my office Outlook machine?!?. Grrr… *whine-mutter*

Added Later: I should point out that the Sunbird folks do have a roadmap which indicates plans for synchronization… so there’s hope. someday. maybe.

2 Responses to “I just wanna know when to be where...”

1. » pingback » Solo Technology » Blog Archive » *sigh* Google Calendar on March 8th, 2006 9:34 pm
   
   
2. Ricky on March 9th, 2006 2:43 pm
   

   Until Office 2007, which will support the iCal format, you might consider trying RemoteCalendars, which will synchronize remote ical format calendars with Outlook. It works pretty well.

   http://remotecalendars.sourceforge.net/

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