The Consolidated Personal Productivity Platform at Paul’s Blog of Tech and Nonsense

Recently (like 4 days ago), while trying to re-enter the world of consolidated - easy to deal with - email, calendars and all sorts of information sharing, I decided to try something I’d done in the past: use one email tool to help consolidate my accounts. I have a few, but not too many. I also wanted an online desktop of sorts so that I could see all of the calendars and tasks I have to view, and figure out how to keep on top of all of that stuff. Luckily, I don’t travel much, or that would have been another bunch of tools!

So, I set out on a quest to find the right grouping of tools to make it all work. In this lengthy article, I discuss the products I tried out, as well as what worked out for me as of now. With the ever-evolving world of computing, things will change in my bag-of-tricks in the near future, I’m sure, but for today, this is where I am until I find something better.

Here’s what I checked out:

Backpack - a cool set of tools if you don’t already have someplace to deal with and sync your information. I love the ability to collect and create pages of stuff you’re doing; like researching a purchase, or just keeping a log of things. …and if you’re a consultant that needs to track projects and time, they have another product called “Basecamp.”
30Boxes - A nice calendar tool, but not much else. It does sync nicely with CSV exports from Outlook, but who has time for that?
AirSet - I’ve covered this product before and think it’s a really neat concept, but they currently don’t offer a way for me to sync my Outlook 2007 stuff - now THAT would make their solution pretty sweet!
Plaxo - A very cool tool I’ve been using for a few years, which syncs Outlook stuff really well (Calendar’s, notes, tasks, and contacts - with the great ability to help you get rid of the dupes!). Their new 3.0 version is really slick, too, but still no email.
Google “stuff” - Google’s host of products makes for a good argument. They’ve got all of the things I would use on a desktop (email, publishing documents, spreadsheets, RSS reader, calendar, to-do’s, notes), AND they support the formats I need, AND they let me consolidate email. What’s best of all - their Spam Detector is Better than Norton’s is! After using products like the Norton Anti-virus and Webroot’s spyware detector, I’ve always been pretty happy with the results of how well they filtered email and watched out for the “baddies” trying to hack into my PC. Of course, sadly, I need these tools because the computing world is just a bad place.
More Google Stuff - Besides the personal tools I could use, Google Apps also offers the ability to do the same things and share it with others under your own domain name. So, part of my analysis was to play with the Google Apps hosting platform, as well. Lest we forget: iGoogle; the widgety version of a portal that everyone is doing for that crazy Web 2.0 we geeks keep talking about.
Hosted Exchange Services - Admittedly, I am a Microsoft bigot. It’s just what I grew up using and writing so much code for over the years. Make no mistake, I’ve written code for VAXes, IBM cash systems, and PDP-11’s. I’m not just a Windoze junky! Anyway, I have a PocketPC, and I sync it with Outlook. I don’t mind syncing my PDA/Phone to my work and home systems, and I don’t mind having a background process syncing my home Outlook stuff to an online source. So, that’s not a problem for me. However, syncing email isn’t something that gets done by most tools - it’s all about the calendar stuff and that’s pretty much where it stops. The difference here, with hosted Exchange is that you have to pay for it - with others you don’t.
Orb or SlingBox - These tools/hardware help you by letting you get to your multimedia stored on your home network, and view them anywhere in the world. Orb gives you access to your pictures, music, videos, and TV signal available through your PC hardware, and SlingBox gives you access to your TV/Satellite/DVR/DVD or any IR controllable device in your A/V cabinet. Both offer interesting methods for doing these things and both can be amazingly good at delivery over the web - even to a PDA/Phone!
Wesabe - a financial tracking tool. You can upload your QFX files (that’s a Quicken format) into this site (which is extremely secure) - without your account numbers, just account names - (like your credit cards) and look at each of your transactions - yeah, I know you can do that on the bank site. But this site lets you do stuff like analyze your spending and it helps you save money. How? It is a user community that offers tips to your transactions based on places where you shop. For example, if you have transactions with Amazon.com, then you’ll see a link for tips from members telling you how you can save while using Amazon.com or some other store that saves you money. They never share your information with others, just generic places you shop get put into their list, but they’re not associated with you. A good tool for people to help other people save their money. They even have an API for you geeks out there.

My one problem (among many!) is trying to do what this article says: have totally consolidate ROAMING online productivity platform. For anyone to have this, they need the ability to get to ALL of their stuff EVERYWHERE they go. That means my calendar, contacts, notes, tasks, instant messaging, favorite bookmarks, email, and documents, pictures, music, movies, TV, are at my finger-tips whenever I need any of them. Like, how do I remember the mortgage needs to be paid, when I use an online method of payment (like through a website or through a tool like Microsoft Money), but that calendar isn’t integrated with my Outlook calendar? How do I know what cash I’m spending and where? There are so many things we need to follow every day, how do you get it all together?

So guess what I chose? That’s right, Google, and here’s why. My high-level needs are generally simple in all honesty. I do want full roaming capabilities to communicate with “my world” but truly, what I need is this:

I want to be able to read all of my email in one place. Every account in one reader - simple and easy.
I have the need to look at multiple calendars of events for different groups and people in my life. Work, home, spouse, kid, and clubs.
I like to read my preferred news sources through one interface and be able to jump around. RSS makes consolidating easy when you use an OPML file.
Keeping track of tasks is always an issue. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell what’s a task and what’s a calendar item. But organization of these things is a must.

One category that has still caused me great pain is Instant Messaging. Yes, I know, that’s so five-years-ago, but it’s still something people do, today. Tools for IM have grown into more productive versions, offering telephone and video capabilities (like Skype, or even tools like Vonage), as well as desktop and file sharing. Some even give you the ability to work with a Tablet PC and let you Ink your messages - really handy when you need to draw a picture for someone! This is the one area where Google still doesn’t have it just right for my “online” version of an office. Instant Messaging clients offer some neat alternatives to communicating with people or even your own world. If Trillian is to the IM world what most of us consider a great consolidation tool, Trillian ASTRA will make this even better with its fully web-based solution. This would further my online version of the desktop and give me access to tools to communicate with the rest of my world, and not just people.

Now, here’s a bit of lunacy that can actually improve your ability to quickly get things done; or at least help you remember them: IMIFIED. I covered this before, too. It’s a neat tool for communicating through and IM client, and then being able to use that client window to perform all kinds of tasks. Like, updating your calendar, keeping track of your budget, even sending tweets to twitter! It also gives you access to tools that help you enhance interfaces. Such as, including an “add-on” to let you communicate with Remember The Milk, which gives Google Calendars Task tracking capabilities. Remember The Milk can even help you use its Mash-up with Google Maps so that you can see where your current tasks are taking you; like knowing where to get the milk you’re supposed to be remembering! … it even gets you closer to being down to using one IM client between your friends and colleagues as well as Tweeting with your Twitter buddies.

So, what did I do? I fashioned an insane collection of tools and interfaces via the web and created an - almost - ultimate environment. Here’s the list:

A Google account to access Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Docs, and iGoogle: the portal interface formerly known as Google. This is my “desktop productivity suite.”
Sling and Orb - two interfaces over the web (not consolidated - yet! but I can get to my stuff, and that’s good!) and PDA for listening to and viewing my entertainment sources from a singular library, instead of syncing with many portable devices. Obviously, I’m not going to go jogging with my laptop, so this doesn’t solve every issue. Though, I could listen through my PDA phone - which has no moving parts; safer for a jog than my iPod!
Trillian Astra - my instant messaging client interface over the web (but they won’t officially let me in on the Alpha, yet!)… with access to…
IMIFIED - my tool for communicating with Remember The Milk, 30Boxes (which I can use for iCal interfaces - which can in-turn be consolidated into the Google Calendar!), Google Calendar, Twitter, and a budget, as well as a quick link to URLTea.

Whew! I know! Lots of stuff to think about, right? The worst of it is that I have a day job and a family to care for, too! Oh, that’s right, that’s what got me thinking about how to do all of this!

If you want to do the same thing I did (and perhaps not have to go insane trying), it’s going to take you some time to create all of the accounts you need and get things cross communicating with each of them. But once you’ve done that, you’re all set. Of course, I could have just done the Hosted Exchange and SharePoint server and just be done with the whole thing. But that wasn’t the point, the point was to be able to figure out how to do this without spending any money and still be able to get results. So, does it help? Yeah, it’s actually helped me get more done in the past few days and it’s kept things in one place for me to see.