For many a year now my personal email, address book (Yahoo) and calendar (Google) have been 100% web based. For the most part this suited me, my primary goal being to always be able to get at my info where ever I am.
In recent months my life has changed somewhat, I’ve jacked in the permanent job and have set about setting up my own consultancy; Jacks Bag. I’ve bought myself a laptop, on which I do a lot of work and carry around a fair bit. That’s mixed with spending time on short-term contracts based out of client offices, using their equipment. To add to the mix I’ve also entered into the world of the BlackBerry, which so far is a pretty nice place to be.
These 3 things combined have meant I now have 3 different places I’d like all of my information to be all of the time;
- The Web (in a client’s office, at a friend’s, in a net café etc)
- My Laptop (working from home, on the move)
- My BlackBerry (non of the above)
There’s little doubt that the word “sync” was involved in the solution, but to make things a little more challenging I wasn’t prepared to change any of my web based providers. Yahoo has the best web based mail client with the best features (disposable email addresses are excellent) and Google offers the best Calendar.
Mail
Yahoo offer POP3/SMTP access your mail, so configuring that with Outlook is easy, the key is to check the “Leave a copy of messages on the server” when configuring it in Outlook. This means you still 100% mail history available from the web. Since Yahoo no longer has any size limit on their mail accounts, this is awesome. To my delight Yahoo also keeps track of what you’ve already retrieved, so you only get a new mail on a Send/Receive. Perfect.
Yahoo also offers a free BlackBerry push service. I was able to configure this via my carriers (O2) website really easily. Being as I’ve already setup Outlook to leave messages on the server, it means I still get a copy of all mail on my BlackBerry as well. If I download the same mail item in Outlook it get’s marked as read on both the web and my BlackBerry.
Address Book
Yahoo gets more points here; they provide a system tray app called Yahoo Autosync. Which can provide 2-way sync for your calendar, contacts, tasks and notes between Outlook and the equivalent Yahoo applications should you wish. I’m just using it to sync my Contacts and it works really well, it sits happily in the system tray and as soon as I change any contact details in Outlook it jumps into action and updates Yahoo.
My BlackBerry’s address book get’s updated using the standard BlackBerry desktop manager on my laptop via Bluetooth whenever the two are close by. Obviously if I’ve added/updated some contact details to my Blackberry whilst on the move, the desktop manager updates Outlook, which Yahoo Autosync is monitoring, and updates my Yahoo address book.
Calendar
It seems there are a lot of homemade solutions out there for synchronising your Google calendar with Outlook. I tried a couple of them and nothing seemed as straight forward as I really wanted. Thankfully Google, fairly quietly, have just released their own Sync app; Google Calendar Sync. This really is as simple as it gets and works quietly without flaw.
Once again the BlackBerry calendar sync’s via the desktop manager over Bluetooth.
I’ve been running like this for a good couple of weeks now and everything has been running without fault, each component silently doing its thing and keeping me sync’d. For me, this setup is pretty much perfect although there are a few drawbacks that might bother others:
- You’ve got to have 2 additional system tray apps running, if you’re really precious about memory this may bother you.
- Autosync for Yahoo uses about 9mb
- Google Calendar Sync uses about 4.5mb
- The Google Calendar Sync app will only sync you’re primary calendar. If you’re running more than 1 and can’t live without being able to sync them all, you’ll have to look elsewhere for a solution.
- Your BlackBerry needs regular-ish contact with your laptop to keep everything perfectly up to date.
Happy Sync'ing!
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