Posts tagged Windows Mobile
Use a free Exchange server to sync up your calendar with one person and task list with another.
May 9th
Hi boys and girls,
Do you remember when Ask The Admin covered a very interesting topic of Free Exchange services? For those who don’t, you can look here, here and sometimes here.
In a nutshell, this article talked about how me and my fiance’ had to plan our wedding and had tons of appointments flying in from both directions.
In order to get our two phones talking to one another and playing nicely, I used a free Exchange hosting service called www.Mail2Web.com to enable my WinMo PDA and my fiance’s Blackjack to sync calendars every 10 minutes logging into the service through ActiveSync, as if they are the same phone. As a result, both phones would have the same calendar information, and keep it that way every ten minutes.
I’ve had this system going for some time now, and it’s been working just fine. I haven’t even had to login to the control panel for anything!While figuring out this howto, I noticed in my own phone that WinMo gives you 4 categories of info items to sync, (as illustrated by the image so cleverly placed on the top of this blog) – Contacts, Calendar, Email, and Tasks. I realized that my fiance’s BlackJack also had the choice of 4 different points of info to sync. This meant that every WinMo device can choose which information to sync with an ActiveSync Server Source and more importantly, which information NOT to sync with an Exchange Server. So we’ve established that my fiance’s BlackJack and my ATT 8525/Hermes were acting as if they had the same calendar – consider them synced.
So this was a real world problem solved by the fact that 2 people have phones with WinMo and Activesync, and the availability of a free exchange service @ www.Mail2Web.com.
Now onto the next real-world problem: The Admin and I have a lot of tasks involved with keeping our beloved website up and running, current and fresh. Throughout the months tasks have come and gone, but certain tasks fell through the sieve and got replaced by more current, more urgent tasks that took precedence at the time. So basically tasks were getting lost. Since neither of us used the built in Tasks application in WinMo, this presented the perfect opportunity to put my theory to the test.
I know that I already have 2 people logging into MY Mail2Web account to sync calendars. But what would be wrong with 3 people logging into that same account – except that my Fiance’ will only sync Calendar information, and The Admin will only sync Tasks information (and NOBODY syncs Contact information).
So I had the The Admin log into my Mail2Web account through his ActiveSync Server Connection and sync only Tasks, and I had my own phone begin to sync Tasks with the same service it was already syncing to for Calendar information, which coincidentally my Fiance’s phone was simultaneously syncing Calendar information with as well.
Problem solved:
Me and the Admin with synced Tasklist,
Me and the Fiance with synced Calendar.
Free.
Automatic.
Just the way we like it.
AskTheAdmin.com.
Free Tech Support for the Masses.
Commodore 64 (the one you used to play Bruce Lee on.)
Sync Windows Mobile Calendar, Tasks and Contacts between more than one device.
Feb 28th
Hey boys and girls!
Have you ever been in a situation where you wished you could sync calendars with somebody who is seemingly unconnected? On top of that, you wished that somehow, by some magical force, those calendars can sync automatically, wirelessly and invisibly; involving no further effort beyond the initial configuration, and that this calendar should follow you wherever you go. Naturally (who wouldn’t, right?).
So here is my situation:
Fiance’ 1.5 wants to perform a systems upgrade to wife 2.0.
Now we’ve teamed up towards common goals before. Planning a vacation, weekend getaway or even organizing a trip to the movies takes some collaboration right? After all, we’re busy people in this day and age. We have our own agendas. But now we are faced with the largest team effort we have ever faced collectively, together. It’s not the vows I’m talking about, it’s not the commitment. It’s not the prospect that this is the person you will be staring at for the rest of your life. No. That doesn’t scare me one bit. What scares the holy crap out of me is planning the wedding. This big, monster of a team collaboration project. If you succeed, you win the reverence and admiration of over 150 guests, including family members, friends, coworkers, and possibly bosses. If you fail, FOR SHAME TO YOU (as my Russian family would say). Pure embarrassment. So basically, failure is not an option. So fiance’ 1.5 and I were faced with a conundrum. How do we stay in sync? How do we go about speaking to multitudes of wedding service providers and making appointments with these people simultaneously, while being able to see at a glance whether or not there are any appointment conflicts. So this is our problem – we need to stay connected, within a 10 minute lag time from one another – no more, no less. But who has the time to call each other every 5 minutes, and in between other phone calls, to make sure were not conflicting?
So first I’ll list what we are working with:
- A PC at home with Activesync and Outlook, synced nightly with:
- An AT&T 8525 HTC Hermes with an unlimited internet plan – this is my phone.
- An AT&T Samsung Blackjack – this is my fiance’s phone – never synced, EVER, WITH ANYTHING – she never even knew it could do that.
At first I started insisting that her and I come home at the end of each day, and enter any and all appointments into MY outlook, and then add herself as a meeting attendee. This creates an email which is sent by Outlook that automatically enters the appointment into her phone, and is updated on my phone when I sync via USB every night. This idea looks great on paper, but requires a bit of a commitment to come home every night and devote X amount of time transferring scribbled notes into outlook.
So at first I searched for a way to sync via IP address. No Dice. It seems M$ removed this after version 3.4 of Activesync . My only recourse was an Exchange server. Now I’ve never used Microsoft Exchange, and I’m only now becoming familiarized with what Exchange can do for a person, team, or organization. In my case, Exchange would allow my fiance’ to enter an appointment into her phone, real time and it syncs with my phone. Since Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone Edition doesn’t allow you to add attendees to an appointment, and Windows Mobile 6 doesnt know what to do with vCal items in email, Exchange Server is a requiem for this to work. Considering we’re on a tight budget for time and money as it is, enter mail2web.
From the mail2web site:
“mail2web LIVE, our free Exchange Email solution goes beyond webmail to provide calendars, task management, contact lists, advanced rules for sorting messages, and even ActiveSync capability.”
mail2web LIVE is just one of the many services this site offers. You basically sign up for a FREE (love that) mail2web live account. A free live account comes with alot of task and personal management features. It’s no coincidence that it supports all the various PIM information types that Outlook supports such as Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, Email, and others. For my purposes, I only wanted to use the calendar feature, since I didn’t want any of my fiance’s contacts, nor did she want any of mine. So of all the features mail2web LIVE offers, Calendar was the magic bullet.
I started off by opening the free mail2web account. This process entailed divulging practically no personally identifiable information about myself. Basically choosing a username, and the desired email address to which I’d like the account associated. As soon as that was complete, there appeared an interesting button with the words “configure your mobile device for this account”. Hmm sounds almost too tempting… could this be a trap? It’s just too convenient. Clicking this link yields a popup with links to downloading auto-configuration files. For some strange reason this config file didn’t work for me. However further digging revealed a “Control Panel” page with an “Activesync Settings” sub-panel. This page is dynamically generated to contain the exact settings for your mail account. Which is the main reason I can’t link you guys and girls straight to the page. This page contained all of the settings needed to manually set up my phone to Activesync via this Exchange server, which contains my personal account hosted by mail2web. At this stage I’m presented with a choice on my phone, by activesync, as to which points of information I’d like to have synced with this server. Since this mail2web account is strictly for the purposes of synchronizing my calendar with my fiance’s, I was very careful to be sure that only the “Calendar” checkbox is checked. If you’re using this service as your personal activesync server, that you and only you will be using, you can just as well check every box and have all your information conveniently backed up to mail2web’s servers. But I have a different evil scheme.
My scheme involves both mine, and my fiance’s phone, syncing to this ONE account for the sole purpose of retrieving and synchronizing the calendar, and only the calendar.
While this is not what the service was originally meant for it is technically possible, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t go against any of their policies or T’s & C’s, so I used it to my advantage.
When I was done setting up activesync on my 8525 to sync over the air every 10 minutes with my new mail2web account, I grabbed my fiance’s Blackjack and did the same with her phone. I set up her Activesync to connect to the server provided to me by the mail2web Account Control Panel’s Activesync Settings sub-panel. Now her phone and my phone are magically sharing 1 calendar. And this calendar updates the Exchange Server every 10 minutes when her phone syncs up. This information is grabbed by my phone every ten minutes when that syncs up, and this information is transferred to my home PC’s instance of Outlook when I hook up to USB to charge every night. This works perfectly vice-versa as well, when I enter a calendar item into my 8525.
It is now a seamless and invisible background task that her and my phone perform, and we are totally in sync. Now, when she makes an appointment with a florist for Wednesday of next week at 8:30 PM, My phone knows about it no more than 10 minutes later. And when I look at my calendar to make my own appointments with a Videographer, I’ll see instantly not to mess with Wednesday evening of next week, unless I want to be watching other peoples wedding videos at 10:30 PM on a weeknight, after spending 2 mind-numbing hours in a flower shop.
This is truly the closest I’ve ever felt to my girl, and we really are connecting in a way that not many other couples have connected in. My only gripe with this process is that I keep thinking I have a manicure appointment on Tuesday. She better hope I don’t show up and try to claim it.
I hope this helps some new couples get their schedules together, or some business partners sync their collective work schedules up. I’m positive this free service mail2web provides will help lots of people discover the benefits of collaboration, Windows Mobile style.
Peace
Commodore 64 (the one you used to paly Bruce Lee on)
Can I have my cell phone voice mails sent to my email?
Jan 25th
Hello Boys and Girls,
Can you imagine a world where your voicemails are automagically transcribed by a robot and sent to your email inbox?
How would you like being able to read your voicemails instead of calling in for them?
Commodore 64 back again after a short hiatus for the holidays and a whole lot of winter fun in the snow. I’ve also spent the last month or so trying this new service called Simulscribe. If you look closely at some Yellow Cabs in Manhattan, you’ll notice some of the cabs say Simulscribe on top. They are one and the same as the company which streamlined my voicemails for the past month.
Simulscribe, from my experiences, is an awesome service for a guy like me.
I, like many other schmos, am hopelessly stuck to my PDA. I’ve been stuck to my PDA ever since it was just a PDA. I remember being so happy when I got my first used Palm Vx in the mail, and oh how I giggled like school child the first time I beamed something thru an infra-red port. Now the PDA in many cases is a mobile office, with Wi-fi, Bluetooth 2.0, Edge and G3 with simultaneous phone calls, E-mail, SMS, MMS, Spreadsheet, Word Processor, Slide Viewer and unfortunately Voicemail.
See the irony here kids? Voicemail is the dinosaur of communications. It is by far the slowest way I know to absorb information. And on top of that, it’s just one more thing you have to “check” 5 times a day, and twice a day on weekends. And who can forget the sloooooow menu systems for checking and deleting. It seems the natural order of things that a convergence is needed. In the true spirit of useful capitalism, Simulscribe came along and saved us some aggravation.
The service works like this:
You go through a one-time setup which essentially switches your phone account from using your current voicemail system, to Simulscribe’s voicemail systems. Except that Simulscribe’s voicemail systems are so much better. You basically have to enter a code in the phone that you are provided when you sign-up and Simulscribe begins to intercept any of your phone calls which would normally go to voicemail. At that point their system goes to work trying to transcribe as much of the message as it can, replacing whatever it can’t with question marks. It sends you this in a text message with the relevant caller-id included. It then sends an email to the account(s) of your choosing with the message as an ultra-small audio attachment.
The end result is that you never have unread voicemails hanging around your phone like before, which was an annoyance in and of itself. Another interesting observation I’ve made is that the Simulscribe transcription system isn’t perfect – and rightfully so. With so many possible variances in voices, background noise, heavy ethnic accents it’s no wonder the system often times sends it’s share of question marks my way, but interestingly enough, it’s good enough. The fact of the matter is, most of the time I get 2 types of phone calls: the random “hey, how’s your mum call” which usually transcribes near if not perfect, and the “context call” where, even if the system doesn’t transcribe certain more complex words, you can usually, purely from context, understand the gist of the call from the words the system was able to transcribe. In the end the point gets across, which was the main need I had. The annoying touch-tone voicemail system was eliminated, and was now replaced with a text message that is 90% or better more often than not. If that doesn’t get the point across there’s an email right behind it with the message as an ultra-compressed audio attachment. Still, no annoying touch-tone voicemail system you have to go through. Now it plays in Windows Media Player Mobile on my terms when I feel like listening, if it’s even necessary in the less than 10% of cases where transcription was less than successful.
In Simulscribe’s defense, most of the unsuccessful ones were from my father, whose heavy European accent would fool even a military grade transcription system. There is also a nifty online interface for managing your service options, as well as your transcribed messages. And if you are caught in an area where your PDA just isn’t swingin any net, their dial-in system works from any grimy payphone you can get your hands on.
All in all the service is great. I’ve enjoyed using it and will definitely be subscribing. The best part is that the good peeps at Simulscribe were nice enough to extend an
Free is the place for me, and aTa is the place for all kinds of cool, new free stuff.
Stay tuned kiddies, C64 is making a comeback!
Special Ask The Admin Offer – Free 30 Day Simulscribe Trial for aTa readers ONLY!
Emoze – Free Push Email without a Blackberry – The true path to democratized, real-time mobile email.
Nov 21st
Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen,
This is your friendly Commodore 64 here to report on yet another useful, tech-improving, free service that is bound to improve any nerd’s life fo sho.
This new service, which has solved a long standing problem, in my view, with send/receive, hates attachments, crappy, slow, sluggish, snap-crackle, pop3 email technology. The software is called emoze, which is a spin-off of a company called Emblaze.
We covered this service in one of our previous posts here, but now we’ve really gotten up close and personal.
Now we are not instant fanboys of anything or anyone here, but we are a bunch of wise(ass) admins, and we do know what’s good for us, and any of our end users who are on the go, and email dependent. That person will attest to the fact that it sucks to have to send/receive on a schedule. Most people have their email send/receiving on an average of every 5 minutes, which makes for a very cumbersome convo, at best. If those convos are short and sweet, like most, they become exponentially cumbersome. So we know whats good, and after trying emoze with my corporate outlook mail, and using it’s proprietary ‘desktop to mobile push’ clients for about a week now, we can truly say this a great service, and good for you too! Best of all, for a single end-user, the service is totally free, just the way we love it here at AskTheAdmin.
We had the pleasure of personally meeting with Neftali Shani, Chairman of Emblaze and Active Chairman of emoze, in a one on one pow-wow where we were really able to get a sense of his vision and mission for the company and the free service:
We are committed to enhancing the user experience, making emoze the world’s most flexible and user-friendly push email and synchronization system…
All in all, emoze is the most efficient and effective way to keep up to date with emails, calendars, contacts and other data when on the move, no matter what mobile device or information management system you use.
We support Lotus Notes and Domino Servers, Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, POP3 and Web-Access, among others – democratizing push email and data for consumers and businesses alike.
The emoze program installs a client on your desktop that ‘listens’ to any new emails coming into your Outlook running on your pc. On the mobile side, a program running on your pda/smartphone listens to what the desktop client has to say, and integrates that with an email account that looks pretty much like your other mobile email accounts – with one caveat – NO SEND/RECEIVE!
The service, while connection dependent, works pretty invisibly, though it uses it’s own notification to let you know an email has come in. I’m pretty sure thats the same notification that MMS uses, but I dont get enough MMS messages to tell the difference.
Messages come through to your phone almost as instantly as they do to your outlook, so I’d have to say this service is pretty tight.
The only gripes I have involve issues that, in all fairness, might not be the fault of emoze. These issues might actually be the responsibility of the hardware or OS manufacturer. For example, when starting up the phone, the emoze client takes a little long to load, sometimes taking more than a minute to go through it’s syncing process. However this is most likely due to my connection speed. Also, while tethered to my laptop via bluetooth and internet connection sharing, it seems to want precedence over my shared connection so connection speed was pretty hampered. All in all, these are problems that would likely solve themselves in time, as connection speeds make their way up. Also as more hardware manufacturers adopt the HSDPA standard, this will do away with whatever lag time the emoze client unearths.
Also worth noting is that I can’t be considered the average user. My HTC Hermes/8525 has ALOT of stuff loaded on it, besides the 4gb memory card i have blazing inside. I’m pretty sure that for the average business end-user, this service would be almost completely transparent and would invisibly provide someone with exactly what emoze promises – Free Push Email For ALL!
In summary, emoze is a wonderful service. Free push email for the masses is a big undertaking but the good people over at emoze have taken it upon themselves to try to improve the democracy associated with email.
Very noble.
_ThePushyCommodore_ (yup still the one you used to play Bruce Lee on)
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