I tend to work with a fair number of documents in my job. Between articles that are sent to me, editorials I write, and presentations I give (not to mention blog posts), I have a lot of data floating around.
Over the years I've organized things into a few folders that I tend to use to keep myself on task. I have one for my OneNote documents that I use for Editorial writing. I have a second folder for all the articles I get from authors, and I have a presentations folder. Pictures, video, etc. I have in other places, but I rarely use this stuff away from my desk.
When I was traveling last fall to various places, I found myself way out of sync. I'd get articles from authors and then had trouble trying to get them back to my desktop, match them up with the correct author, keep track of them based on dates, etc. I ended up losing a couple articles and really annoying authors.
For awhile I would just copy my entire folder of "articles" to a USB key and then copy it to my laptop when I traveled and then reverse the process when I returned home, but I ended up losing track of which machine had the latest version of which article. What I really needed was ...
I really needed some way to easily replicate data. During an interview with Eric Johnson of CSTechCast, he showed me Live Mesh, a service from Microsoft and Windows Live, that allows you to share folders among machines.
It sounded great, so I gave it a try, signed up, and then registered both my desktop and laptop as "devices" in my mesh. This is essentially a cloud for your folders and machines.
I then picked my presentations folder, my OneNote folders, and my articles folders, and marked them as items in my mesh. Once they were registered on each machine, I could see my files in sync from either location.
I've been doing this for about two months, and so far it's been a breeze to use. And my files stay in sync. I can edit something on my desktop, walk upstairs to my laptop, and in a few minutes they're in sync. I can take my laptop on a trip, edit things and then they're back on my main desktop when I get home. Since the desktop is where I do most of my work, this is really handy.
The only downside is that if I go disconnected on the laptop and edit things without an Internet link, I need to make sure I let it sync up at home before I start using those same documents on the desktop.
OneNote is interesting because it saves automatically as you type. If I pause for a minute, I'll see the Live Mesh in my task bar syncing up with the cloud. I was worried about trying it with Outlook PST files, but Google gave me another way to do things, so I'm sticking with that.
There's a remote control option as well, which I tried on a trip, but it didn't work. I'm not sure if my connection was too flaky or the 3 monitors on my desktop broke it, but I couldn't get it to work.
I'll give Live Mesh 2 thumbs up for now. I've found this to be a simple, easy, and reliable way to keep data in sync across multiple machines.
One of the things that I've struggled with for some time is how to manage my data across multiple machines. I have my desktop below, which I love, and with the 3 monitors, I tend to do most of my work there.
However I also travel regularly with my laptop, and I've been considering a netbook for shorter trips and presentations.
That has caused me issues with my schedule in Outlook as well as keeping my data in sync. I tried copying off my .PST file from Outlook and copying it around, but I have a huge file and that doesn't work well. I tried using a USB key to move data around, but occasionally I'd forget things. I was getting frustrated by the hassles and considered moving completely to my laptop just to keep things in sync. Then I discovered two solutions:
The impetus for this solution really came from my purchase of a T-Mobile G1 phone, powered by Android, the free OS from Google for small devices. This phone is highly integrated with Google's services and they push you towards GMail and their other services. I already had a GMail account, so this wasn't a big deal for me.
However as I looked more at the features, I noticed that Google has a nice calendar service and that if I enter appointments on my phone, they sync up with my Google account. That's a nice feature, but I wanted to still use Outlook where possible since I get appointments from Red Gate in Outlook.
Google knows that most people use Outlook and it's a nice desktop client. So they built Google Calendar Sync, a utility that you install on your desktop and it moves data from Outlook to your Google account. I downloaded and installed it, and have a 2 way sync with my desktop machine. I have a one way sync with my laptop, and since I'm the only one entering meetings and reminders, I never have collisions.
I set this up, and immediately saw all the various entries on my desktop moved to my phone inside of a couple hours. I used the defaults of having my desktop sync every 2 hours and my phone every hour.
Over the last month, this has worked outstanding for me. I can enter a new doctor's appointment when I'm out and by the time I get home, it's on my desktop. This way I get reminders on my phone, and on my computers, all kept in sync
Last night I was at the store with Delaney after karate and he mentioned that we needed to go pick up snowboards from the shop. I'd forgotten Thur afternoon to get them and wanted to remind myself to go Fri.
I had my TMobile G1 with me, but also my iTouch. I decided to enter the appointment there since I sometimes have that with me and nothing else. So I typed in an appointment on the iTouch. We got home and I plugged it into my desktop to sync it up. That's all I did.
This morning I woke up and checked for my appointment. It appeared:
5 places, 1 entry, one plug in to sync my iTouch.
Very cool!
I was looking at Twitter the other day and saw a few of the people I follow debating the need for disconnected applications. With so many providers now offering wireless access plans for data, and the prices coming down to levels where almost tech professional can afford to have an unlimited data plan, an Aircard of some sort, or a tethering option, do we really need to worry about disconnected applications?
Is wireless access to be expected like phone service?
If it's not there, it's a rarity?
I'm not sure we are there yet. If you live/work in many places, you're probably a little spoiled with the constant connections you get as you wake up, drive to work, go to kid's soccer games and more. However as someone that lives in a rural area and gets to the city for big events, I see lots of holes.
My connections are spotty where I live, and I see issues more often than most people, but it shows me that the seamless connections moving from cell to cell don't always work, and that there's still a lot of variability on quality. Between my family, we have ATT, T-Mobile, and Sprint phones and we have a variety of success at different times with the devices.
In addition, when I go to large events, like the Bronco's football games in Denver, connections around the stadium for data are not great. I have great signals, but it seems that the cell towers get overloaded with so many people trying to connect at once. I haven't had the 3G Google G1 out there yet, but have had issues weth EDGE connections. Maybe that will be better with 3G or WiMax.
Using SQL Server Express or SQL Server CE to power an application on a laptop or smaller device that might not always be connected, to me, is something we should still plan for. And we should have good database people building these to incorporate as much automation through replication as possible. The movement of data from a smaller database to a larger one should be seamless for developers.
As much as I like little applications on my G1 that can help me, some of them fail without an Internet connection, and it's very annoying. Data entry, recording of measurements, etc. is always something that we want to continue, even if our link goes down. I still see connectivity issues at conferences when there are lots of people trying to use wireless networks, and I can imagine that these days even small events, like a local soccer field full of kids and parents, can overload a tower in one area.
Designing applications to work in a disconnected manner is something I think we still need to do for at least a few more years.
