Cloud and the Consumer – Part II

Jani — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:14:35 +0000

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!

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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My First Encounter with Google Apps

Jani — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:48:23 +0000

Till a couple of months back, Microsoft Exchange and (Pocket) Outlook combination used to be the epicenter of my productivity. I was almost addicted to the ActiveSync/DirectPush feature so much so that I was reaching out to my Windows Mobile at unearthly hours to check mail or to add a task. I used to continue my unfinished work at home seamlessly. At least 40% of my official mails were sent from Pocket Outlook on Windows Mobile while I was away from home or office. I did that not for an year or two, but for almost 8 years!

Everything changed since my departure from Microsoft. My new employer doesn’t support Push email feature on Windows Mobile (My wife is really happy about it!). And most importantly, my personal calendar, mails and tasks are totally out of sync. On top of it, I switched to an Apple Mac. Syncing my Windows Mobile with Exchange server gave me a complete peace of mind as every contact, message and calendar was on the server. Windows Mobile not paired with a backend Exchange server makes it completely useless and dumb!

Now my scenario is very different – I have an official notebook running Outlook that’s connected to my corporate Exchange server, my home PC running Windows Live Mail client connected to a bunch of email services, my Windows Mobile downloading mails from the same bunch of email providers, and of course Mac OS X Mail client configured to work with my GMail, Hotmail etc. When it comes to managing a personal calendar, it is a chaos! I missed the luxury of accessing and updating my calendar from any device that I want to.

When I was switching my domain to GoDaddy, they offered me an option to try Google Apps. I signed up for the following services –

GMail
Calendar
Docs

This conveniently gave me the customized mailbox, calendar through http://mail.janakiramm.net , http://calendar.janakiramm.net . I moved my mailboxes from my old hosting provider to my customized GMail backend.

With a little bit of experimenting I achieved what I have been looking for –

One universal mailbox that pulls (through POP) mail from all other accounts hosted on my domain!
One universal calendar that synchronizes across my office notebook PC, home PC, mobile phone and my MacBook.
Contacts on the cloud in my mailbox.
Just one Inbox to deal with irrespective of the device that I am using.
My official and personal calendars completely in sync and my Windows Mobile up to date with my appointments.

You may ask me why not Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Calendar . Syncing Windows Live Calendar is not supported on Windows Mobile and I just found it very convenient to hit one ‘Sync’ button on my mobile phone to quickly synchronize my mail, calendar and contacts (just the way I did it when using Exchange!)

I plan to write another detailed post on how I got this working. All I can say is if you are using a Windows Mobile and want to exploit the Push capability, go pair it with Google Apps.

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Cloud and the Consumer – Part II

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