SYNC OR SWIM

Dick Pountain/13 December 2000 14:46/Idealog 77

Following my little psychodrama in last month's column - Palm V, suitability for foreign travel of - things have returned to something like an even keel. Palm rose two notches in my estimation when they unquestioningly replaced my Palm V free under warranty for a non-charging battery, but they lost one notch again due to a reluctance to replace the duff Travel Kit cable. In any case, there really don't seem to be any immediately attractive alternatives for me in the PDA market at the moment - I find all of Palm's other models either too big or to have unacceptable battery life, with the possible exception of their new 'Fisher-Price' m100 model (good for chewing on if you're teething) which I may eventually have to settle for. I'd buy the Handspring like a shot were it not for the fact that I lack a working USB port at present: none fitted on my desktop, disabled by NT 4 on my laptop.

A consultancy job I did recently gave me the opportunity for an extended evaluation of Compaq's new iPaq, which is currently the hot ticket among gadget lovers. I liked its bright, sharp screen enormously and found ActiveSync and Outlook now definitely superior to Palm's HotSync and Palm Desktop combination. In fact if the iPaq were half as thick, half the weight, had twice the battery life and cost half as much I might well consider buying one. What the iPaq trial did do for me though was to force me to reconsider whether or not I want to join the rest of the world in using Outlook as my main PIM and communications centre.

I still use Palm Desktop in preference to Outlook as my PIM, largely because I just hate the grotesquely over-complicated forms and horrid layouts that Outlook uses for its Contacts. My communications centre remains Ameol, because not only do I use Cix conferencing every day to communicate with the Real World columnists, but I have all my Internet mail directed to my Cix mailbox too. I like the way Ameol works, and I love the way it's helped me avoid all the mail virus and Trojan horrors of the last two years, all of which depend on security weaknesses in Outlook to wreak their havoc. However one argument for moving over to Outlook remains persuasive, and that is that it might allow me to achieve my long term dream of keeping just a single unified database of names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and fax numbers: at present my phone numbers are in Palm Desktop, email addresses in Ameol, and fax numbers in Winfax Pro.

That goal has just receded a little further because of the fact that I now spend significant periods in Italy, and have left an old laptop down there to act as a mail/Web browsing machine that I don't need to hump all across Europe. I can log onto Cix just fine from Italy - using telnet via my AOL account or Cix Roaming - though admittedly my two nearest numbers, Florence and Perugia, are both slowish connections. The problem is that I thereby split up my Ameol message base, and while Ameol does have a 'reset pointers' command to restore conferencing messages, it has no equivalent for mail. Before I leave Italy I try to remember (and more likely forget) to export all the mail I've read there and mail that file to myself - and when I arrive back in London I have to remember to reset pointers to the correct date, re-read conferencing messages and import the mail if I want to maintain one coherent message base. Stir in the fact that I have two machines in London, plus my Palm V, and keeping all these different data sets in sync just becomes a practical impossibility.

In another recent column I expressed grave doubts about the ASP business model and the principle of letting other people host your data for you, but it seems clear that I do need some kind of remote central storage facility for my personal data. I don't trust ASPs, I don't like any of the Web Calendaring services I've looked at, so what do I do? I'm quite interested by fusionOne's Web-based synchronisation service (www.fusionone.com) though I don't think it will do everything I need yet - it would certainly do more if I were using Outlook though, and it may eventually be one way to go.

However it occurs to me that what I really need is to store my PIM information on my *own* Web site. All it would need is some program that synchronizes my key PIM data files between a master set stored in my Web space and whichever machine, in whichever country, I'm currently working at. It could use ftp or even DOS xcopy, though to achieve reasonable speed it ought to be incremental, copying only what has changed. It's even possible that some program I already have, like Synchronizer 3.0 from the PC Pro cover CD, might do the trick if used in conjunction with the remote file access facilities of Windows 2000 - a disconnected file share via a VPN tunnel set up by the Proxy Server. Of course that would mean both switching to Outlook and upgrading to W2K, which would put me perilously close to becoming a mainstream PC user, but what the hell, I can do normal when the rewards get high enough.