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If you are like me it may be some time since you saw your (whole) desktop. That is the top of your desk rather than your personal computer. It always seems to get buried beneath notebooks, Post-it notes, receipts, business cards and the like. In theory, the "groupware" applications and personal information management (PIM) software on my office, home and portable PCs should make organising my business, personal and family lives straightforward.
Well, it does not. For a start, the Lotus Notes software on my office machine is possibly the least collaborative piece of collaboration software developed. Virtually no other software works with it. More annoyingly, I have yet to find an easy way to synchronise the contacts, diary entries and notes on my office PC with the PIM data stored on my other machines.
There are plenty of remote-control packages -- my favourite is GoToMyPC from Citrix Systems (www.gotoMypc.com) -- and synchronisation software/services such as LogMeIn (www.logmein.com), BeInSync (www.beinsync.com) or Siber System's Good Sync (www.goodsync.com), but none is designed to synchronise PIM data between different machines and different applications. So I decided to look around at alternatives including online PlMs and calelders-web-based services that enable individuals, work groups or family and friends to co-ordinate personal information.
Although online PIMs are not new, some now come close to replicating the functionality of their desktop counterparts. Most also enable collaboration with group diaries, contact sharing and message-board features.
Some, such as the Webex WebOffice package (www.webofftce.com), are sophisticated and relatively expensive; others, such as Airena's AirSet (www.airset.com), are free but mainly targeted at family and other small groups. Another group, which includes Trumba OneCalendar (www.trumba.com), do one thing -- shared calendars in the case of Trumba -- very well.
Webex WebOffice is a particularly impressive set of web-based tools designed for small businesses. It comes in two versions: WebOffice Personal, priced at $50 a month, and WebOffice Workgroup, priced from $60 a month for five users. Both offer a rich set of online services including calendar, web meetings, contacts Iists, task management, shared databases and secure document sharing -- all accessible from any PC with web access.
ContactOffice (www.contactoffice.com) is another fully featured web-based PIM and groupware service giving users access to a full set of data organisation tools, including web-based e-mail with up to 3Gb of online e-mail storage. This service includes up to 1Gb of document storage and enables users to send short message service (SMS) text messages to mobile phones.
ContactOffice comes in two versions, Individual and Group, and is available in three languages, French, Dutch and English. Versions are priced according to features and storage capacity and cost from nothing to euro50 per user per month.
Both WebOffice and ContactOffice are sophisticated services that may be more complicated than some users require. One-of the best free services I came across was the AirSet service, which works with PCs and Apple Macs running OS X with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari browsers.
AirSet groups are easy to set up and can be designated as either personal (private) or public. For users in the US, the service also works with mobile phones on the Verizon Wireless network enabling mobile access to any AirSet data.
Yahoo Calendar (http.*Ilcalendar.yahoo.com) is another free service worth taking a look at. Do not be fooled by the name though: the service provides a IF address book. notej=aand e-mail services in addition to a diary.
The interface is clean and Yahoo has made it easy to import and export contacts with a selection of desktop PIMs in~luding Microsoft Outl&k'andbutlook' Express.
IntelliSync for Yahoo is a downloadable program that enables users to keep the information in the Yahoo Address Book, Calendar, To-Do List and Notepad in qvne with Microsoft Outlook, Palm or Pocket PC devices and ACT! or Lotus Organiser PIM packages. It synchronises data between two devices automatically.
If all you need is a simple yet powerful web-based calendar service, my favourite is Trumba OneCalendar, which is free for 60 days and then costs $40 a year. Trumba, which works with most web browsers, is equally suited to organising family or business schedules. Users can create colour-coded private and public calendars, share appointments with family, friends and colleagues and invite non-Trumba members to view a calendar via an e-mail message and link. Once you have set up a personal OneCalendar, you can add events manually or import existing schedules from Outlook, Yahoo or Apple ICal calendars.
For those who struggle to keep two calendars in sync Trumba OneCalendar provides a simple and effective solution. But if you need a full web-based information management system there are plenty of free or low-cost alternatives.
One note of caution, however. Like all web-based applications, there can be a time lag before the services respond to requests. Over a broadband connections this is not really a problem, but the delay on a dial-up line can be frustrating.
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