Talk about great timing. Last week I finally decided to take the plunge and move all my “personal information management” (PIM) stuff from Outlook+Scheduleworld to Google – and none too soon, as Scheduleworld announced today that it is becoming a paid service!
For those who don’t know, Scheduleworld was a great service that offered synchronization of Calendars, Tasks, Contacts and Notes across several computers and mobile devices, and made your stuff available online, with a great AJAX interface – a true web 2.0 service. It allowed me to sync all my info to both Outlook and Thunderbird. I use only Thuderbird for my email, but I still liked Outlook to organize my contacts, calendar and to-do list. The one thing it did not do was over-the-air syncing to the iPhone (like the Apple service, mobile.me).
I decided that I just had to have over-the-air sync to my iPhone, so I started putting together a collection of solutions to give me everything I wanted. This time, my PIM stuff is centered around Google, with a few more programs and services for support. I use the Google Calendar and Google Contacts, both installed as apps on my laptop using Google Chrome. So I scrapped Outlook, and use only the Google Apps now (note that I can use them offline thanks to Google Gears). I then got an extension for Thunderbird to sync my contacts from Google. I can sync both contacts and calendars to my iPhone using NuevaSync, which offers over-the-air syncing just like mobile.me, and for free! (Google Mobile Sync now offers the same for free too, but NuevaSync lets you sync more calendars.)
I use Evernote for my notes, which also syncs to a website, so that I can access my notes on clients installed on any computer, or on the website itself, or even on an iPhone App! It also offers OCR, so I that I can create a “Photo note” on Evernote taking a picture of a card, and the program will convert it to searchable text – it’s really cool. Finally I started using Remember the Milk to keep track of my tasks and projects. It is an online service, but can also run as an offline app through Google Gears. Although the free service is great, I decided to shell out the $20 to be able to access it on my iPhone (yes, it IS expensive, but I never spend money on software, so I decided to give it a try). The last item on my new “PIM solution” is rainlendar, a program that put the calendar on my desktop. I just installed it, and it costs 10 euros to get the pro version with Google Calendar integration, but the program looks amazing, so I might get it too. I should mention that I use Vista, and that I don’t like the whole widget thing either from Microsoft or from Google – they seem to take too much system resources. I do use Google Desktop, but for the search only (we can Google as the default search on Vista SP1).
So this is how I now organize myself. A little spread out, but it does give me a lot of functionality. I would strongly recommend any of the programs that I am using.
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