Corporate Sales Guy

I worry sometimes of having some form of OCD based on how much time I’ve spent trying to figure out the best way to balance work vs. home computing platforms.

Once upon a time I worked for a company with a flexible IT policy. Let me cut to the chase, it wasn’t long before my corporate laptop was sitting on my shelf collecting dust while I happily plugged away on my mac for both personal and business needs. (Our tools were mainly web based)

Anyhow, trying to keep a corporate blackberry and MS exchange in sync with my entourage on my mac + iPhone I think I spent more time worrying about the sync success than anything else. Moving to a new job just a couple of months ago for a company that would surround my cube with a swat team by even thinking of plugging in my personal mac into a holy network receptacle I had to rethink my corporate / personal IT setup.

We all have stuff outside work to do. You may be politcally active, you may have a family, you may do some consulting on the side or heck you maybe just an obsessive compulsive gadget guy/gal that needs a hefty personal IT setup.

Long story short – after realizing that I had to separate work and personal infrastructures here’s what I ended up with.

Work – Nice HP laptop with Win XP + Blackberry and Exchange with full wireless sync between the 2. Using Windows in general is like sawing the small flap of skin between my toes and dousing it with rubbing alcohol but by installing some 3rd party apps I’ve made the best situation I can. For you GTD’ers out there – the Netcentrics plug in for Outlook is functional with no frills which has kept me from the constant tweaking that we gtd’ers are notorious for. Overall it just works but it’s ugly like exposed plumbing in a non-urban chic apartment.

Personal – Macbook Pro, Mac OS X 10.5, iPhone + Fully hosted Zimbra email hosting with full email, iCal and contact wireless sync. (Think MobileMe but with my own domain) For the 1st in my life I can send meeting invites from iCal to Exchange/Outlook users and it works! (I am using www.01.com for my email hosting with custom domain). Zimbra setup is identical to setting up exchange on the iPhone you even select “exchange” on the iPhone to do the setup. Zimbra is great, it’s 100% compatible with all things Mac but it’s just like exchange.

This setup absolutely rocks, no more Entourage (not a bad app but doesn’t hold a candle to mail app + iCal). By keeping work and personal separate I am able to do what I want without compromise. In a past life I used Entourage to get full exchange functionality. With Zimbra I can actually check ICal availability of anyone i add to my Zimbra account. I am digging this setup as I’ve waited for a long time to have exchange-like functionality for personal use without huge expense and without having to use entourage on my Mac.

I attempted to get the whole mobileme experience using Gmail but the CalDav functionality is limited to meeting time syncs back an forth to the mac only. The iPhone never liked anything from Gmail and besides it was never “in the cloud” or “over the air”. Additionally meeting invites only worked from the google calendar interface.

The long and short of this: do I feel like a moron wearing a blackberry and an iPhone? Yes a little. But I am able to take care of personal things such as civic work and family events with ease and a level of organization I haven’t experienced ever.

I’ll save my personal GTD setup for another post but as a preview it’s simple and effective and I find myself quickly forgetting the mechanism and actually doing the things I need to do.

My title was inspired by my reading of 100’s of posts that outline setups like this:

Exchange syncs to entourage, entourage iSync enabled syncing to iCal, iCal syncs to Gcal, Gmail syncs to another computer via BusySync.(remember there’s a Blackberry and an iPhone mixed in there somewhere!) It’s just too much. (BTW Busy sync is really good, and probably the only way to so a clean calendar sync between iCal and Gcal).

More to follow on this setup. BTW this entire entry was composed on my iPhone at about 34,000 ft in the air on my last trip for work using Wordpress for iPhone.

-csg