Syncing up Your Life
People who travel or work from home typically use several computers to manage their email and documents. It can be difficult to stay organized when certain files or emails are saved to one computer, but, not the other PC they use. If you are working on a number of computers between home and office, these issues are probably common:
- You have to manually transfer information from your work computer to your laptop because they are not synced. Whether you have a personal or business laptop, it would be useful to have access to all of your emails and files when you’re away from the office. Using a program that automatically updates all of your PC’s with the same data in real time via the Internet would help to keep you organized and efficient no matter where you are.
- You are working with a coworker on a project and constantly have to send the updated files as email attachments. When working remotely, you may be going back and forth with a coworker making edits to a document. This process could be simplified by using a solution that saves the document in a synced folder at home and updates that same folder or file at work and on your colleague’s computer.
- You have to manually add appointments to your mobile phone when you’re not in the office.
When traveling for business, you want to stay on top of meetings and appointments. Having your calendar synced to all of your computers will help make sure you don’t miss anything. Sharing your calendar with your coworkers will let them know when they can reach you.
If you find yourself running into any of these issues, it may be time to start thinking about syncing up your life so that you always have access to Outlook data such as contacts, calendars and email.
Get in Sync with Peer-to-Peer Email and File Sharing
Anyone who has ever tried syncing Outlook folders has experienced the pain (just look at all the activity on Microsoft’s help forum, or TechRepublic’s help forum, or the other numerous advice stops on the Net. The Redmond team does have its own blog focused on Outlook, which is handy to peruse from time to time, however, these all assume staying within the Bill Gates family is the only option. It isn’t.
Take a look at peer-to-peer offerings (like ours) that allow Outlook and file exchange with co-workers directly from one machine to many others. If one PC is offline, our server kicks in as a temporary storage facility. When the PC pops up on the Internet again all content is synced and deleted from our servers automatically.
Quite handy when working on a collaboration project where the entire team needs to access, update and manage a bunch of files, email or a calendar. Having shared Windows and Outlook folders accessible to all team member PCs right from their native Outlook GUI, allows everyone to be more efficient without having to switch applications or learn a new system.
Ideally, a syncing solution shouldn’t require any interaction with the company server – users should be able to connect one machine to the rest of the group directly, making the process of working from anywhere much more efficient. The help forums mentioned above all discuss problems dealing with just this issue of managing inefficiencies caused by the Exchange Server / Outlook syncing process. In our case, this direct interaction is entirely secured using very strong encryption and an SSL communication protocol.
Choose the right tool and peer-to-peer connectivity can be painless while extending the practical use of syncing email, calendars and files.
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