London Regional ICT Champion

Two days in to the Great Web Office Experiment , and it’s been just as hard as I thought it would be to kick the Outlook habit (which I had to resort to for one email to a large distribution list). Otherwise, it’s been web 2.0 all the way for email, contacts and calendar. Other items in my web office toolbox – del.icio.us and Google RSS Reader – will get blogged later on in the experiment.

Getting started was easy enough. To synch contacts, Plaxo supplies a handy widget that installs into the Outlook toolbar. The widget is also smart enough to sniff out duplicate contacts between Outlook and your online adresss book in Plaxo. For those wanting to go the Plaxo-centric route to the web office, Plaxo’s widget will also synch your Outlook calendar, notes and tasks.

Moving from the Outlook calendar was also straight-forward and all it took was to export my Outlook calendar and upload it to my Google Calendar. I wrote here about how to import and share calendars in Google.

For two way synchronisation between Outlook and Google calendar there’s the handy SyncMyCal tool, which installs into the Outlook toolbar. The free edition offers limited synchronisation (of events 3 days before and after the current day), so we’ll see if it’s worth upgrading for the full benefits.

However, the real big-daddy is switching from Outlook email to Gmail. If there’s one thing Google doesn’t do very well it’s contacts, and that’s surprising given the way that Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Talk and Google Mobile all seamlessly integrate with each. It is possible to import contacts as a CSV file into Gmail, but Google’s contact management is rather basic. I have set up email forwarding from Outlook to Gmail, so people will now start getting emails from my alias, ictchamp@googlemail.com I hope this won’t confuse folks too much….

Document-wise, it’s also been something of an admin day, so I haven’t eally needed to work on any documents in Zoho.

However, I have needed to do some digital photo editing – resizing an image – and used the excellent PXN8 for this. So that’s my arguement for Photoshop out the window.

I’m also glad to see that the experiment has been generating interest from around the community blogosphere. David Wilcox wrote on his blog:

I think it is pretty much impossible to understand how useful or not new online tools are for your personal or organisational use without trying them. It’s another world, another language and just translating the technobabble isn’t enough. Packages may seem attractive – but you can land up with costly disappointments. You need to make the trip and explore for yourself.

Of course that takes time and quite a bit of effort, and it helps if someone else can offer insights, focus and encouragement. In short, a guide: but then, they need to have done some serious exploration first.

David also lists the “intriguing School of Everything, being developed by Paul Miller and friends”. Check out their list of tech tools .

Beth Kanter mailed me to say she’s also been meaning to go cold turkey on outlook, but is in the middle of her busiest workflow of the year and hasn’t yet made the jump:

I hope you will write about weening yourself from the comfort blanket that is outlook – I have the exact problem. I have this desire to switch from outlook to gmail, but I haven’t been able to shift my habit at or event think about how to start.

I wrote about that here:
http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2006/08/inbox_reveries.html

And, Michael Stein wrote a reply, but six months later, I’m still stuck in outlook.

Aaron Levie from online storage company Box.net also wrote in to let me know that they have now integrated Zoho Writer. You can read about it on the Box.net blog.

I’m already using Box.net to store my working documents, and with one click I can now open my Box.net documents in the Zoho writer – another of the web 2.0 tools I’m playing with. This is a great example of mashing up services and delivering seriously good workflow to the end-user.

I’ll be writing more about Zoho Writer tomorrow, so as always, let me know if you’re thinking about it switching to the web office or you’re already there.