.KEYWORD pda
.FLYINGHEAD TECHNOLOGY SKEPTIC
.TITLE I sync, you sync, we all sync with WeSync
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT FIGALT pda-cover.gif
.SUMMARY While the handheld device revolution has certainly made organization a whole lot easier, keeping more than one person "in sync" still seems like a far-off dream. Or is it? Contributing Editor Kevin Quin examines one way to keep everyone’s schedules on the same track.
.AUTHOR Kevin Quin
Let’s tune in to a typical evening at the Quin homestead:
.Q Mom
Honey, the Cleavers called today and invited us over for dinner next Thursday.
.A Dad
But Thursday’s the Horn Blowers’ Concert.
.Q Mom
No, I called the school and the recording says that’s on Monday.
.A Dad
They changed the phone number. The new recording says it’s Thursday.
.A Child 1
(loudly and off key) TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR, HOW I WANDER IN THE CAR…
.Q Mom
Well, if it’s Thursday, then let’s move the Cleavers to Tuesday.
.A Child 2
Gurgle bwa glack wa BLUK!
.A Dad
Tuesday we promised we’d visit Aunt Edna. There’s nothing on the schedule for Friday.
.A Child 1
(tugging on a sleeve) You be Barney and I’ll be Baby Bop! I LOVE YOU, YOU LOVE ME, WE’RE SITTING IN A GREAT BIG TREE…
[Note to Dear Reader: please stay with us, it’ll be worth it.]
.Q Mom
Friday we have to go to the preschool candy sale information meeting.
.A Dad
But when I sent in the forms I picked the second meeting, a week from Wednesday!
.A Child 2
Waaaa. Waaaa!
.Q Mom
You had the wrong address. They didn’t get them, so we got stuck with Friday night instead.
.A Child 1
Lookit, Mommy, baby can FLY!
.A Child 2
WAAAA!
.Q Mom and Dad
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!
You’re probably thinking this sounds like chaos, aren’t you? Well, you’re wrong. Mom and Dad (you guessed it, I’m the Dad) both have Palm organizers, so, by definition, we’re organized. Well, okay, not all of us. Child 1 consistently demonstrates that age four and organization go together about as well as turtles and calculus, and Child 2 refuses to accept a schedule for anything, including sleep.
The problem is, however, that we’re organized separately, not together. Sure we share calendars and address books, but we can’t keep them working together. We try to sit down at the beginning of each month to compare notes and get everything straight, but no matter how hard we try to work together, by the end of the month everything is hopelessly out of whack. My wife writes in a new phone number, I record an address change, she reschedules a meeting, I add a doctor’s appointment, and by the end of the month, you’d think we didn’t even live in the same city, let alone the same house.
Sure, all of that information goes into our Palm devices, and it gets synchronized into the PC that has anchored itself in our kitchen. And we could check the Palm desktop on the PC every time we wanted to change something. But Palm organizers were supposed to free us from that ball and chain, weren’t they?
This isn’t just a problem for two-Palm families. Imagine how much time’s wasted among multi-Palm workgroups in an office. If the boss moves a meeting, everyone needs to be told and write it in their Palm. If a customer changes a phone number, everyone in the office needs to scribble it in.
Sure, there’s a feature in Palm Desktop 3.0 called file-linking that allows certain changes to be transferred to all the users, but it’s cumbersome and very limited. In practice, only one person can make changes. Any group, from families, to sales forces, to law firms, that tries to keep its members organized with Palm devices suffers from this problem. Basically, group members are synchronized, but they’re not in sync.
Here’s the way it should work. Each person in a multi-Palm group should be able to identify several groups in his Palm organizer — family, sales, and corporate, for example. Each event or address listing (and perhaps to-do items and memos as well) could be for that person only, or could be designated a "shared" item for one or more of the groups. When any group member makes changes to a shared item, those changes would automatically get transferred, through the family PC or the corporate LAN (local area network), to the other Palms in the group when any member performs a HotSync. The changes would be entered automatically, and the whole process would be almost invisible to the user. Like almost everything else about Palm organizers, updating of group events and address listings would become hassle-free.
This seems obvious to regular folks like you and me. We know that two heads are better than one. But Palm developers, until recently, seemed to feel that one head, alone with its Palm, was just perfect.
Poor solitary buggers. They need to get some friends, don’t they?
.H1 Introducing WeSync
At last, it seems, they have. Enter WeSync.
WeSync is the trade name for an integrated set of tools that allows Palm users to share and update calendars and address books. It’s the brainchild of WeSync.com, Inc., a software company based in Portland, Oregon, which rolled out a preview version of its software in October. I’ve been looking it over, and I like what I see.
WeSync provides the ability to keep members of a group in sync that I’ve been longing for. But WeSync has aimed much higher. The software also allows users to pull in information made available by third parties, such as airline and hotel phone lists, timetables for your local movie theaters and sports teams, or concert schedules, as you can see in Figure A. The list of items you can load into your Palm device this way seems endless.
.FIGPAIR A Aside from setting up your own personal and professional communities, you can also pull in information made available by third parties.
.PAGE
WeSync works through the Internet. You register free of charge at http://www.wesync.com and download the software to both your desktop and handheld device. When the software is loaded, you log onto the Web site and set up a "community" for each group with which you’d like to exchange information, as shown in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B Once the WeSync software is loaded, you log onto the Web site and set up a "community" for each group with which you’d like to exchange information.
As in my earlier example, you could set up Family, Sales, and Corporate communities. Other Palm device users join your community by accepting the email "invitations" you send them from the Web site. Once your community has gathered, so to speak, you upload calendars and address books from your Palm organizer to the Web site, where they are available to anyone in your community to download and view on their Palm organizer. You can make these "resources" (yes, that’s the term WeSync uses for them — sigh) read-only, or permit other community members to modify them.
And here’s the magic part. When another community member performs a HotSync, her PC will connect to the Web site and upload any changes she’s made to the address books or calendars of the community. Then when you perform a HotSync and your PC connects to the Web site, those changes will show up on your handheld device. Once the community is set up and the "resources" are made available, the process is nearly invisible to the user.
Your community is private. Only the people you invite can join and view the address books and calendars you’ve made available. But WeSync has a much bigger picture in mind. While your resources are private, the company is encouraging the listing of "public" resources that anyone can download. While there are only a few available now, my guess is that so many companies and organizations will jump at this opportunity that WeSync will soon need to deploy a special search tool to help users sort through all the available information.
.H1 Calendars and WeSync
Although my goal for multi-Palm user groups was simply to allow them to insert shared events on each other’s calendars, WeSync goes one very big step further. They offer a calendar that is uploaded to the WeSync Web site that is actually downloaded to, and can be viewed and modified on, another user’s Palm.
For families, that’s a big help. If my wife asks me to schedule an appointment for her, I can write it into her calendar right from my Palm. More importantly, if I want to set up a joint appointment like a meeting with a teacher, I can find a time that we can both attend, and schedule it on both of our calendars at once.
You might hesitate, however, to make your entire personal calendar available to your coworkers. No problem. Wscalendars is WeSync’s replacement for the handheld calendar application — it looks almost exactly like the Palm OS calendar application, but when you use it, you can access multiple calendars. On the wscalendars application on your handheld device, you simply create a new calendar (how about one called "office"?) and copy your work-related appointments into it. That can be the calendar you send to your colleagues.
Copying events into other calendars, whether they belong to you, your colleagues, or your spouse, is easily done and is the centerpiece of the WeSync system. On your handheld device, when you schedule an event, select the Event Details button. In addition to the familiar Palm options (Alarm, Repeat, Private), you see a box labeled "calendar." When you select this, a box pops up as shown in Figure C, listing each calendar you have available on your handheld device, whether it’s your master calendar, your office calendar, or a co-worker or spouse’s calendar.
.FIGPAIR C When you select "calendar" from the Event Details menu, a box pops up listing each calendar you have available on your handheld device, whether it’s your master calendar, your office calendar, or a co-worker or spouse’s calendar.
Just check off the ones you want, and the event becomes a "shared" event. When you or any community member modifies the event, the modifications will eventually make their way — through the WeSync Web site when you perform a HotSync — back to the calendars of the other users.
If "eventually" isn’t soon enough, you can beam an updated calendar to another user through the infrared port on your handheld device. The update will be somewhat more limited than if it came from the Web site, but the Web site’s version, with full details, will eventually get copied to the devices when both of you synchronize.
.H1 Shared address books in WeSync
Address book sharing is even easier than calendar sharing. On your handheld device, you’ll see a new application called wscontacts. This is just a small utility application that runs on handheld devices. There’s also a desktop version. It allows you to select which address books you wish to share. You still need to use the Palm address book to actually access your address listings, however.
Click on wscontacts and you get a list of your Palm address books. You can select any of them to send to the Web site. When you log into the site, you select a community to share the address book with, and from there anyone in your community can download it. As with the calendars, you can allow modifications to the address book or make it read-only. Changes are sent to and from the Web site during synchronization.
.H1 The family PDA
So here’s how it works for my family. I set up a community named "Family" and my wife joined it. I sent our joint address books (like doctors, banks, family, etc.) and each of us sent our calendars to the Web site. We "published our resources to the community," in WeSync-speak. Then each of us logged into the Web site and clicked on the calendars and address books we wanted to view on our handheld devices. We "subscribed to the community resources" in WeSync-speak (sigh again). And, almost magically, my wife’s calendar and address books appeared on my Palm, and vice-versa. Any changes we make now ultimately go through the Web site and appear on the other’s handheld device.
I should emphasize that WeSync works only through the Web site. Your desktop PC doesn’t make the changes and distribute them — only the WeSync Web site does that. So don’t expect to see changes on your handheld device (or your Palm Desktop, for that matter) until both users have performed a HotSync to the Web site.
I suspect that some might view this as the Achilles heel of WeSync. To be sure, I’m a bit uncomfortable sending my personal information to a third party Web site. And if I’m hesitant to let a Web site know that I’m seeing my dentist next Thursday, how is a Fortune 500 company going to feel about sending customer lists through that Web site?
The folks at WeSync are aware of this, and it’s clear that privacy is their paramount concern. Only the people you’ve invited to your community can view your information. Only time will tell, however, if they can convince business users to sign up.
And that’s important to you and me, because business users are probably going to foot the bill for the rest of us. As with some other Palm Web-based services, WeSync expects to be free to the public (can you say hallelujah?!!) and offer an expanded, fee-based package to businesses. I’m sure going to be hoping those businesses buy in.
.H1 Full public release on January 24, 2000
WeSync is currently available in a preview version (yes, engineers, a beta-release), and, like any such software, there are a few minor glitches and some confusion in the instructions. I’m sure these small wrinkles will be ironed out soon, but for now, regular folks like me can avoid some headaches by letting the techies stamp out the bugs. WeSync expects to make a full public release, with significant improvements in the Web site, among other things, on January 24, 2000.
With any luck, come then, evenings in your multi-Palm household can sound like mine:
.Q Dad
I scheduled the parent-child swimming class for next Saturday, but, um, as you can see from my schedule, I’m going to have to work that day.
.A Mom
Cute. And I scheduled the garage sale for Sunday, when you have nothing going on.
.A Child 1
Look, Daddy, I gave myself a haircut!
.A Child 2
BURRRRP!!!
Or not.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Check out the WeSync Web site at http://www.wesync.com/.
.H1 Bulk reprints
Bulk reprints of this article (in quantities of 100 or more) are available for a fee from Reprint Services, a ZATZ business partner. Contact them at reprints@zatz.com or by calling 1-800-217-7874.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Technology skeptic Kevin Quin organizes himself in the PDA wilderness of Washington, DC.
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6dc85
