As I have mentioned recently to few folks like Michael, I’m trying to get my personal productivity and task management back on track, as is my wont this time of year.
However, this year I have managed to complicate things a little by moving myself and family to the other side of the world, taking a challenging job in a whole new industry and spending the three months prior working from a briefcase and laptop at various wifi hotspots. To add to the disorientation, I’m required to use Outlook as my main PIM at work when the last time I used it, it was called Schedule+. Instead of the more usual laptop, I have been issued a new smart phone, an iMate Jam running Windows Mobile to hook into my mails and PIM functions via the company’s Exchange server. All this is slightly at odds with my personal setup, where I’ve pretty much moved all my non-work computing/online activities to my iBook and my Mac-compatible Nokia 6680 3G phone. I have almost relinquished the PC to the women of the house, save for using it as the admin terminal for the ADSL service and my wifi router. I still have and cherish my Palm T3 but don’t use it as I’m overloaded with gadgets and the Mac Palm Desktop is less than friendly in my opinion.
And the point of all this is? Casting around for possible solutions, I happened upon BitPal, a cross-OS PIM that seems to offer the possibility of bridging the yawning gap between Windows environment at work and my Mac/Symbian. Small enough to sit comfortably on the smallest of my USB thumb drives, it’ll be interesting to see how it works out, though the initial sync with the iBook is taking an awful long time – perhaps not the best of omens.
[UPDATE] – Subsequent syncs were no faster so it’s back to the drawing board for now. I like the premise of BitPal so I hope that the development of the idea continues.
Lots of the managers here are using the iJam, some rave about it, others don’t. Their biggest bug bear is answering the phone and standing around shouting “hello” a la Dom Jolly for 5 minutes (much to the ammusement / annoyance of the rest of us).
The email servers here are exchange, and everyone is equipped with a laptop, however due to our network resembling the stability of a dial up network (5 minutes to log on every morning), they need multiple devices to do their job.