Part 1 and 1B

Communication

Communication, as you can imagine, is a huge part of my life. My grandparents were among the first cellular phone retailers in the United States, and thus ubiquitous communication regardless of geographic proximity to a phone has been engrained in my consciousness since I was a young age.

Ergo: remember the Zach Morris phone? I had one. In Jr. High.

Ubicomp and PComp

Here is what I wanted: a polyfurcated identity.

What do I mean by that?

I wanted, since I started using computers, to maintain my carefully constructed online identities in parallel with my real world identity. In fact, at some points, I wanted my real world identity to be subjugated beneath the online identities. I always wanted to be a screen-name, a website, a AIM id, an IP address at the same time as I was the pale kid with a bad hair cut.

Anyhow, what this boils down to is I wanted ubiquitous computing and pervasive connectivity. I was promised this in 1999. I finally got it in about 2002. Now, since that time, I have been tweaking my system to get to my ideal.

The ideal

I have some stated goals in terms of my communication regiment, as well as some preexisting conditions that necessitate specific solutions.

Predicate Situations

1) I receive upwards of 500 actionable e-mails a day
2) I (as of yet) do not have an assistant to handle scheduling
3) I travel a lot, both around the world and in this building
4) My job requires me to surf the web, RSS feeds and the like in order to keep on top of all situations that effect our business.
5) I am (yes) in management, so I have a staff to be concerned with
6) I use on any given day 6 computers

Ideal Situation

1) My e-mail will be consistent across computers and devices
2) My schedule will follow me anywhere and cross-sync to each device
3) My address book will do likewise
4) Use centralized web services where they make sense
5) Large external data needs to be secure
6) No data synchronization issues (thus client/server, not p2p)
7) All mac solution, all native Apple syncing (this to prevent problems with synchronization or compatibility)

The Solution

Lets start with e-mail. When I first did this series, I was using a PPC-6700 with an Exchange provider. In the time since then, I changed to using a Blackberry 8700 with Mailstreet as my server host. The primary issue with using Exchange was at the time syncing calendars with iCal, and Address Book with Address Book.

When Microsoft introduced Entourage / iCal/Address Book syncing, this problem was solved.

My current situation is thus:

My mail, all of it, forwards to Mailstreet. Because I can’t alter the MX records for my company, I have it using “split forwarding” which means just forwarding all my mail to an alias. This kind of sucks because it means that I have no Spam filters running at times, but I’m working on fixing that. My Blackberry 8700 syncs perfectly to the Mailstreet Exchange server.

No, Mailstreet’s server works perfectly with Outlook in Parallels to do server-side rules and such. To get it working perfectly on the Mac, I have to do a few things.

The first is, every Mac I have runs Entourage hooked into the server. Entourage is set to sync to Address Book and iCal, and set to check the Mailstreet server once every five minutes for changes. The sync between iCal and Exchange happens near instantaneously.

So it looks like this:

iCal -> Entourage -> Mailstreet

Its fast, efficient and works perfectly. The Blackberry 8700 is a perfect little device for this.

Coming up tomorrow… the Blackberry 8700, Net News Wire, blogging and more.