So today I bit the bullet, and following the theory put forth in this post, I set up a Microsoft Exchange Server account to which I intend to sync both my Centro and my wife's Centro. The idea seems sound: I want to be able to share and maintain the calendar data on both of our devices, seemlessly, wirelessly, and automatically. The most logical way to go about this is to have a shared calendar that can be automatically updated over-the-air. Since Microsoft Exchange Server is specifically designed to store calendar data on a central server, but share it amongst any number of instances of Outlook (or supported mobile devices), without causing data to be duplicated or lost, it seems pretty much the ideal choice for solving my problem.First thing's first. I backed up my data. And I Hotsynced. And then I backed up my data again.
And then I configured my Centro for its first sync with the Exchange Server. Exchange Activesync, the OTA conduit for syncing to an Exchange Server, is built into VersaMail, which comes installed on the Centro. So no additional software is necessary. And it's written by Palm, so it should be more likely to work, right?
The first sync with the server was a nail-biter. And long. After eight or ten minutes, naturally, a phone call interrupted the process. My data is ruined! I was sure of it. I restarted the sync. Thirteen minutes later, and I was absolutely floored. Everything was fine. It's all on the server. It's still on my Centro. There's nothing duplicated. Nothing missing. 1200+ calendar entries, and it just worked!
Despite feeling buoyed by the initial success, I'm already seeing flaws in the plan. I realized, going in, that this plan meant my wife and I would SHARE THE SAME CALENDAR. We wouldn't just be sharing a collaborative calendar, or anything like that. It would be EXACTLY the same calendar. Any changes I made, she would immediately see. Any changes she makes, blam!, on my phone too. Alarms? Yup, those too. This makes me a little bit nervous. But (hopefully) I'll survive.
What I didn't see coming? Despite the option to set which aspects of Exchange Activesync update automatically (email, calendar, contacts), you can't actually turn any of those aspects off altogether. That means that we'll also be sharing a contacts database. This would be less of a problem if my wife didn't prefer her contacts very informally named, while I prefer mine to be very specific. My proposed solution: all of her contacts (she has relatively few) go into their own category.
Over the rest of my evening, I had some errors with the auto-sync. My entire calendar vanished. I had some successes with the auto-sync. And my entire calendar is back where it belongs. I don't know quite what to make of that, but as long as it stays where it belongs in the future, I'll write that off as a glitch.
The next morning I tackled my wife's Centro. I backed up everything, and Hotsynced. And backed up. And then I purged the calendar, to minimize the duplicates. The vast majority of entries in my wife's calendar were beamed over from my phone, so there was probably little risk, anyway. But I played it safe. And I changed all of her contacts to a special category (she wasn't using categories at all). And then I synced it with the Exchange Server. After five minutes or so, everything was set. There were about 2 whole changes in the calendar, and it added her contacts. It pretty much just worked.
I set both our Centros to auto-sync about every 3 hours. I expect that's overkill for our needs. Versamail tried to enable Push, but, as appealing as that is in concept, it'll be way too much of a battery hog.
So where does all this leave me? Now any (and all) changes that either one of us makes to our calendars (or contacts) will be mirrored on the other Centro within a handful of hours. Automatically. My wife benefits from my compulsive use of categories, as she never used them before. And I shouldn't have to worry nearly so much about whether I've kept her calendar properly up to date with the latest appointments. And probably the most convenient benefit will be regarding appointments that are deleted or rescheduled. Creating new appointments and beaming them over is relatively easy to stay on top of. But remembering to make identical changes to a rescheduled appointment in my wife's calendar was a real pain.
This experiment has been underway for all of about a day now. So far so g-- Well, so far, anyway. I'll keep all you PalmAddicts posted on my progress as I go. Wish me luck.
