Sync'd Up

I happen to work for a company that had a marketing line referring to "Blended Lifestyles". When I first heard it I thought ... "Hmm, is that gay and straights living together or conservatives and liberals or traditional families and not so traditional families or ..." Nah. None of those. It was simply a blend of technologies seamlessly integrated, video, voice, text, data, etc.

Now you might be wondering what that has to do with being "Sync'd up". Interestingly enough, very little. But I too feel as though I have finally conquered some level of blended technologies on a personal note.

See, I am forced to use a IBM Thinkpad with Windows XP, Outlook and Exchange at work. But, as I may have said earlier, I've gone MAC and I ain't goin' back. I've come to use my Powerbook at work running RDC to access my XP system. But I also still use my PocketPC, which at this point, I'd have a really hard time giving up.

So my dilemma, how do I keep my PocketPC, Outlook on XP, and iCal and Address Book on the MAC all sync'd up?

Well it took some doing. Short answer : Missing Sync for Windows Mobile

But the road I chose to take was quite a bit longer. I tried a number of different "solutions" involving shared group calendars between the OS X and XP, setting up Apache and Tomcat on OS X, and different flavors of OS X to PocketPC sync software. Some other applicatons attempted were XCConnect and PocketMAC.

Either due to my inability to "configure" things properly or gaping holes in the functionallity all other solutions failed miserably. Believe me, I worked with each of these until I just couldn't take it anymore. Let me be the first to blame the failures on pilot error. If I can't get something working in a few days that I plan to use every day, it's probably not worth it.

While Missing Sync is working well now, it wasn't without its miss queues. But the latest release seemed to have addressed most of the issues.

So, I typically, use four categories in Outlook, or 4 Calendar Groups in iCal; Work, Home, Holiday, Birthday. Birthdays and Holdays can be imported into Outlook as add-ins. In iCal, they are add as read only calendars (Birthdays and US Holidays), which Missing Sync doesn't support. So, this is what I ended up doing...

Birthdays and Anniversary events in Outlook I categorized using a new category Outlook Birthdays.

I sync Work, Home, Outlook Birthdays, and Holidays from the Outlook on XP to the Pocket PC.
Under OS X, I sync Work, Home, Outlook Birthdays, and Holidays.
So under OS X, I actually end up with the six categories (Work, Home, Birthdays (OS X), US Holidays (OS X), Outlook Birthdays (XP) and Holidays (XP). I don't display the Outlook Birthdays or Holidays from XP under OS X.
On the Pocket PC, I end up with the same categories as XP.

Confused yet. Yeah, me too. But it does seem to work. Continuing on from here, it seems as though I can drop the OS X Birthdays and US Holidays calendars. I guess I want to wait a while to see how all this hangs together.

The only issue outstanding with Missing Sync is that it seems to have a CPU utilization issue. Waiting on a response to that.
But after several weeks of trial and error, I finally feel like I'm sync'd up on all three fronts.