The first part of ‘Cloud and the Consumer’ series discussed how to move bookmarks to the Cloud and keep them synchronized across browsers. In this article, I will tell you how to keep your calendar, contacts and email in sync with your phone by moving them to the Cloud.
Did you ever lose your phone and also lost the valuable contacts that you saved along with it? Do you want to use the reminder/calendar feature of your phone effectively? Finally, do you want to automatically receive all your email from multiple web based email accounts on the phone without manual synchronization?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you may want to read further.
This article assumes that you are using one of the smartphones based on S60 platform with data plan. If you own a high end Nokia phone, chances are that it is based on the S60 platform. You also need to sign up with Gmail for an account. Don’t worry! You can continue to use your existing email ID without any problem. This will not force you to change your primary email ID (You need not even share the new Gmail id with anyone. It will only act as a gateway to all your existing email accounts.) Finally, download ‘Mail for Exchange‘ on your phone.
Step.1 – Configure your new Gmail account to download mails from your other email accounts. Find the instructions here.
Step.2 – Install ‘Mail for Exchange’ on your phone and configure it to talk to your Gmail account. Select contacts, calendar and email to synchronize with your phone. Find the detailed instructions here.
Congratulations! You have successfully configured your phone to synchronize with the Cloud! You are effectively using Gmail features to store your contacts, calendar and emails. While the calendar and contacts are directly associated with your new Gmail ID, your mail is downloaded from your original account and gets routed through the new Gmail ID to your phone. What’s more? You will now enjoy the Push email capabilities of Gmail without moving away from your original account. Periodically, the newly created Gmail account will poll your configured email accounts. It will then download the new mails and instantly pushes them to your phone. You will then receive a notification.
Below is the architecture of what we just achieved.
Cloud and Phone Synchronization
With the synchronization in place, it will only take 5 minutes for you to switch your phones and get back your contacts and calendar! The best thing is that this service is absolutely free. That’s the power of Cloud!
As a Cloud Computing Strategist, Janakiram MSV helps businesses understand and adopt the Cloud Computing paradigm. His core strength is designing and architecting solutions for the Cloud. Janakiram focuses on industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings including Microsoft Windows Azure.
