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IvanExpert Newsletter
April 2008: Feeling Out of Sync?

This is the next installment of the IvanExpert News, an irregular newsletter of what we think is worth talking about in the Apple (and tech) world. Pass it on! (Or, if you'd rather not receive these, please email news@ivanexpert.com and we'll take you off the list.)

Tell me if this has happened to you: you're travelling with your laptop, away from your main computer, and you need a specific message you received -- but you can't find it, because it was downloaded to your desktop computer. Or perhaps you want to locate someone's contact info in your phone, but you can't, because your phone and computer's contact lists are different. Or you worry about losing your phone, because you would lose all of your appointments and contacts!

Many computer users have these problems, but they don't need to be your problems. You can have your email, contacts, and appointments available all the time, on all of your computers and devices, and have it all automatically backed up. There are three basic ways to do it:

Hosted Exchange
The most complete way of having everything everywhere is by using the services of a company that provides Microsoft Exchange hosting. With Exchange, all of your email, contacts, and appointments are available from any computer, as well as on your mobile device, and if you change anything in one place, it's automatically and immediately changed everywhere else. This means that if you put a new contact into your phone while you're out, it magically shows up on your computer at home. I use this system and love it -- it's especially valuable when Caroline can schedule an appointment at our office and a couple of minutes later I see it on my phone while I'm out helping clients.

Exchange is not for everyone, as it is comparatively expensive ($15 to $20 per month). And if you also want to wirelessly synchronize your mobile phone, it'll cost another $5 to $25 per month, plus it only works with certain phones (BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile, or Nokia smartphones; it will also work with the Apple iPhone starting in June 2008).

IMAP and .Mac
The next best (and much cheaper, sometimes even free) solution is IMAP. IMAP is a particularly good solution for Palm users who want BlackBerry-like email at a lower cost than hosted Exchange. However, IMAP only synchs mail, not contacts and appointments -- but you can get those to synch by subscribing to Apple .Mac ($99/year). The combination of IMAP and .Mac will keep your email, contacts, and appointments in synch across multiple computers and a wide variety of regular cell phones and smartphones. The main drawback is that synching is not automatic -- you need to manually tell your devices to do it.

Web Mail
Finally, there's plain old free web mail, such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail -- they'll give you the same email, contacts, and appointments on any computer, and the price is right. This does have some limitations: you always need a working internet connection to access your info, you can't easily synchronize with mobile devices, and you can't use a custom domain (like ivan@ivanexpert.com). Plus you are always looking at your information inside a web browser window.

So if you want to have all of your critical information available to you whenever you want, wherever you are, there are many ways to do it. If this appeals to you, get in touch and I'll help you get there.

If you enjoyed the IvanExpert News, feel free to pass it on! Until next time, may your technology be trouble free.