Google: Brainwash

My wife finally started to use her Outlook calendar to some of its potential. Now that she is putting in her own appointments and using it to run her day to day schedule, she suggested we somehow share our calendars. Since I use my work Exchange server and she uses Outlook as a front end POP client for her Comcast email, I figured our only hope was Google calendar which we both have with our GMail accounts (for Google Talk and all other things Google - like this blog for instance).

I'm loathe to put extra software on a PC if I truly don't need it but I scoured the web for a program that would sync Outlook calendars with Google calendars - which I thought was my only hope - and low and behold; there is one! What struck me last night when I found the best answer is that the first thing I did was assume something shared online must be done with Google.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 can share calendars natively online for free with Office Live. You just need a Live ID ("hotmail" account for instance - which we have for our MSN chat clients). This works a treat! I publish my calendar and she publishes hers. We subscribe to each others and lock down the viewing to each other and ourselves only. I can now view her calendar super-imposed on mine in my Outlook client natively; and likewise, she can do the same with my calendar!

Maybe I shouldn't be so excited or singing the praises of Microsoft, but I'm all for the best solution with the least amount of "kludge", dynamic and easy. In this case, Microsoft beats Google hands down.

Can't See the Forest For the Trees (Killed by the Faxes)

A while back, I posted an entry about IP telephony being dead and cited the forward looking trends of mobilty and device convergence. I may have spoken too soon.

I'm sure we'll head that way eventually, but I may be WAY before my time if we're still worrying about faxes, as indicated by this Network World article.

Seriously, faxing was invented in the 1920's (look it up). With today's technology, can't we scan to email or use a service like eFax? But then again, we still use desk phones while we put our mobile phones down right next to them. Perhaps we'll have stopped using cars to commute before we rid the world of fax machines.

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... wait, you didn't think I was talking about teleportation or anything did you? I just mean telecommuting!