Monday, March 02, 2009

The Mobile Suite ... MM style ...

When being mobile, one of the biggest things to overcome is the ability to have a consistent work environment regardless of your equipment standards ... I have gotten this standardized environment slowly over the years and found several applications that allow this to happen ... let me digress for a minute as I give you rundown on items already employed ...

Because the most easily useful standard is getting and leveraging a simple internet connection, I have settled on the google suite for most of my needs ... as you saw in recent posts, the power of the new google features to create a rich work grouping that allows for very efficient management of several key items ... email, docs & spreadsheets, knowledge or idea management, calendars, and info management in general. Working into this scheme I use Remember the Milk as my task list of choice as it integrates nicely through gmail to allow the email environment to have the todo list simply displayed and useable from your main gmail window. If you look on the RTM website there are two ways to enable integration with gmail ... this is the firefox plug in, you have the choice of even tighter use through the labs feature and that might be the ticket for use on a netbook as it integrates right into the gmail left column to save space .... I suggest playing with both to see what fits better ...

To allow you access to all your important files and synching your work through multiple computers, I have found great utility in Dropbox ... this not only synchs and populates your latest work throughout a population of computers, but also allows access from the web .. thus fulfilling the MM Mobile Suite vision ... I use this functionality to allow for access of application data like OneNote data, MindManager 8 maps, The Personal Brain files, and all kinds of data files that are essential to my work environment ... the beauty of this setup is that whenever I turn on my secondary and backup machines, all the files and data then synchs to last use (one other feature is versioning on the web, this saved my hind portion once when I overwrote a file accidentally ... Dropbox allowed me to restore old version and get going again ... see the revisions button on this screenshot) ...

Will be posting more later on this as there are a few more pieces to go ....

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