Home Work Station and Office Work Station Integration

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mehorrell

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Hi,

Currently I am having problems try to integrate my personal workstation and office workstation. I have a desktop computer at work and laptop computer at home and both are using outlook. I have been trying to us my palm as a media to transfer information between the two but does not quit transfer right. Does any one have any ideas on how integrate the GTD methods when you have two different workstations?

thank you

:?:
 
What problems do you have?

mehorrell said:
I have been trying to us my palm as a media to transfer information between the two but does not quit transfer right.
As far as I know it works for some members of this forum. What problems do you have?
 
Currently I have the GTD plug installed on my home and work computers. When I synchronize my palm with one none of the configurations transfer to they other specifically task groupings. What systems are you using?
 
Palm sync between outlooks... FolderShare

I've not yet been brave enough to do it yet, but I'm testing the file syncing capabilities of FolderShare... there is stuff out there that says this will work, and I can verify that it does work across NAT and most firewalls. You should be able to sync the Outlook.pst file from one machine to the other and retain everything that way.

On the palm side, you're SOL if you use the addin or many of the other fields in outlook, because once you sync, you loose everything that is not included in the palm task (e.g. project info, action context, etc).

Have fun!

Mike
 
This approach doesn't use a PDA, but maybe this will help.

I've been using an external hard drive (80 GB) to store everything that's active, both at Work and Home. I use SyncbackSE to keep the data sync'd between the HDD at work and home (customized to keep work data from my home laptop and vice versa). For Outlook, I just backup the OST file from both Work and Home into the drive.

The FolderShare approach will work too but I wouldn't put any personal data online without encrypting it. And if you use the data frequently, you'll need to decrypt it every time - kind of a hassle.

I've used a PDA-based (Pocket PC) solution for this before, but have found that most PDA sync software (I've used Intellisync, MightySync and others) either don't handle file transfers well (if at all), or doesn't reliably sync data if customized.
 
Why not spend $10 a month on a hosted Microsoft Exchange account? I use that with a Blackberry with Blackberry Enterprise Service (an extra $10) and I am always perfectly in sync across 3 different machines and my Blackberry. I never have to connect a cable either. The moment I make a change on my work computer it is reflected on my house computer and on my Blackberry as well. Or if I enter something on my Blackberry 60 seconds later it is on my 3 computers.

IMHO with pricing as low as it is now for a hosted Exchange account it is the only way to go (www.mailstreet.com). It more than pays for itself in saved time.

Beware, folder share (now Windows Live Sync) works beautifully for syncing files, but I'd be damn careful syncing large data files with it. If you do, I'd recommend a daily backup routine with each backup saved for quite a period of time in case of corruption.
 
I think Remember the Milk (RTM) with tags and Smart Lists is the solution for managing your project and task lists. Because this is an online application, your lists can be accessed from either computer. Further, with Google Gears, you can run RTM offline. Their iPhone app is great, too. It's a little bit off-topic, but with the Evernote and RTM apps, the iPhone is a great ubiquitous capture device with voice, text and image capture plus my lists.

I realize that RTM won't help with your project support files but I think you can use a briefcase folder on a small USB flash drive for this purpose.
 
What exactly do you want to integrate?

As others have mentioned, a portable thumb drive might be the best solution. If you're trying to synchronize your Outlook calendars, you'll need more technical solutions like a hosted MS Exchange account.

If you're just trying to get potential Actions from one to the other, you can just email them from your work account to your home account, and vice versa. I frequently email "REMINDER: Add Project to do..." to myself at the appropriate location.
 
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