SPWD

This is the first post in a series discussing how to create a mobile command center for your life, your business or both.  This guide is centered around using an iPhone (in this case jailbroken and unlocked), Google Apps Standard, Outlook 2003 along with some pretty great free apps from the iTunes App Store.

I have long been needing to sync my life together – ok, not in that way – however, trying to accomplish this has presented some difficulties.  In part I found some of the difficulties in my particular setup of certain items discussed through out this series, as well as just not experimenting enough with the technology I have available.  In talking with others, it seems this can be a common issue, as well it seems with the amount of paid apps, services and entities that offer solutions to tie one’s life together it appears to be potentially widespread.

The Setup That Didn’t Work

For years, I have used various different mobile phones, from the old Motorola Star Tac to a small flip-phone all without any data availability at all, to Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and the iPhone.  It has been an even longer time that I have been using email to communicate online, say 1993 or 1994 when I got my first email address – when email was still text based the majority of the time, just as were the majority of web sites at the time.  Somewhere in that mix creating task lists, calendaring appointments, scheduling my work and personal lives and meshing it all together in a logical way was added to the mix.  In the early years, I could simply task list on the computer in notepad and keep things straight.  2 children, 3 step-children,  college and a real career later notepad has been out the window for many years now.

It started becoming clearer in 2006 that I needed a solution that could tie all of this together, and while I have not spent much time searching for a solution, I have finally found one that I am going to share with you in hopes it might spark your imagination to creating your own solution using the things of tech and non-tech that you have available.  While this series focuses on the iPhone, I will be sharing a series with a very similar solution with using a BlackBerry and if I see a need, will end with a series using a Windows Mobile solution.  While my true mobile platform of choice is the iPhone (for various reasons that could be discussed in a completely separate post), I like the email better on a BlackBerry and certainly had good results setting this solution up with that platform.

There are several hang ups I experienced that the majority of users will not – I do not use email services such as Gmail or Hotmail as my primary email service.  No, in fact, since 2003 I have operated my own email server for various domains and as such have also operated my own DNS servers, web servers and other servers that generally are used to power the web, email and things such as calendaring, task scheduling sharing and so forth.  Why does that present a problem?  Since I don’t use Exchange for my email and simply use Linux based simple solutions, some of the collaboration, sharing and built-in support on mobile devices has been limited to simple POP3 mailbox access and no sharing of calendars, tasks and the like.

Sharing Explained

What?  Share a calendar, task list and more?  Who am I sharing it with?  Let me explain – while I work full time web development for the Professional Bull Riders, I do occasionally do freelance work with the right clients.  In addition, having 2 children, 3 step-children, being active in church and other activities I find the necessity to schedule more than my work day.  Sometimes that work day overflows into the personal day and knowing when there is something important coming up that evening or weekend it good to know to adjust priorities to get things at work done on time (preferably ahead of schedule), or to reschedule the personal items to fit.  No big deal right?  We all deal with that.  Well, when you are looking at operating a freelance project, keeping up with kids, making praise team practice at church (which I just started back to after a 6-month hiatus), along with everything else that goes on in our personal lives I found the need to be connected more personally.  So my work phone, a BlackBerry, is just that – a work phone.  My personal phone, then, needs to become a central station for anything non-work related.  No big deal right?  Wrong.

At work, if I put something on my Outlook calendar, thanks to Exchange and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), it is pushed to my phone in a flash.  So I have all my stuff on my desktop and on my mobile.  Of course, as I pointed out prior, I don’t have the resources to run Exchange and BES to accomplish this type of connectivity.  I checked for a few solutions and found mostly paid apps or other costly services that would accomplish this for me.  Too bad I am a cheapskate (ok not really, but family size does dictate budgets for personal tech many times).  So I developed a solution using some free tools, free services and have found a solution that, for the past week, has had me very pleased with the outcome.

The end result?  I now have complete synchronization of my email, contacts and calendar between my desktop (using Outlook 2003), on the web and on an iPhone.  If I add to one, it will sync to all – so if I add an appointment on my iPhone, I get it on my Outlook and web based calendars and so on and so forth between the three items and applications.  This post series will discuss the exact setup that I have making this possible.

Coming in Part 2: Connected.  Coming in Part 3: Synced; Coming in Part 4: Mobile.