Esquire | Mac » Google Calendar

New Job: Only Mac In The Shop

EsquireMac — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:39:40 +0000

Last month, I started a new job at a new firm. I spent nearly three years at my old firm, and most of what I have written on this blog to date has been related to my experiences there.

If you read my Personal Update last fall, you know that last year I moved back to the town where I grew up – Hagerstown, Maryland. Long story short: The 3.5 hours of driving every day got old and a position at a well respected Hagerstown firm opened up due to one of its (now former) partners being appointed judge.

The new firm runs on a Windows 2003 Exchange Server, and my early-2008 MacBook Pro is the only Mac in the shop. As it turns out, the transition from the Mac-centric firm I helped create to a Windows-entrenched firm was not as difficult as one might expect. I will go into more detail in future posts about specific issues, but, in general, I have been able to access every essential part of the system with my Mac.

File Sharing

The first essential hurdle I faced was being able to access the Firm’s files. This was as simple as plugging into the ethernet connection, connecting via SMB to the local IP address of the server and logging in to the Exchange Account the admins set up for me. This allows me to mount any drive on the server. That works well when I’m in the office.

When I’m not in the office, I set up a VPN connection to remotely login to the Exchange server. When connected via VPN, everything behaves the same as if I’m locally plugged into the ethernet connection.

Although this solution technically “works,” it is far less elegant than the solution I previously had set up with Dropbox.

Email & Calendar

Even though Snow Leopard now technically supports Exchange, it only supports Exchange 2007 or later. Exchange 2007 uses slightly different protocols than Exchange 2003, and is not backwards compatible in that way. Fortunately, however, since Leopard, OS X has had a faux support for Exchange. Exchange 2003 does support the IMAP protocol for the inbox, and when combined with the Outlook Web Access, Mail.app can mimic the Exchange functionality. It works essentially the same with Mail.app as Gmail or Google Apps Mail.

As far as the calendar is concerned, I have not found a satisfactory way to integrate my calendar with the Outlook/Exchange calendars. I know there are some ways to force it all to work together, but the solutions currently available are worse than the problem they solve. I will go into more detail on this issue in a later post. Presently, I created a new Google calendar and gave my staff access to it. They just log in to a Google calendar account I created for them, and they can view and edit my calendar from there.

Oh, and after that little Palm Pre experiment went awry, and in light of my new job, my wife and I decided to take the plunge and get iPhones. We each go the 3GS, and have been loving life ever since. As you may have guessed, the iPhone plays well with my new firm email. I simply have to connect via VPN – which is easy even if a bit of a pain, but, it gets the job done when it needs to get done. The calendar is through Google with the rest of my calendars, so I have 24/7 access to all my work email and calendars on my laptop or on my iPhone.

Anyway, as I settle in and become integrated into life in a Windows firm, I will continue to share my experiences. I have promised myself not to come in to this firm on a crusade to convert everybody to Macs. That said, that’s how I entered the last firm, and we all know that eneded up with a hostile takeover. They are all running Macs now, and would never turn back!

More Calendar Sync News: Save $5 on Spanning Sync

EsquireMac — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:53:02 +0000

Yesterday, I wrote about Calgoo going free and Google Calendar supporting CalDAV. I also wrote in some detail about how our firm came to utilize Spanning Sync.

Last night, Spanning Sync announced a new initiative to recruit new users. It is in the nature of a referral incentive program, and it’s called “Save 5 + Make 5.” The idea is simple enough: If I (as a paid Spanning Sync user) refer you (a new customer), then you get $5 off your purchase and I get $5.

It’s an interesting idea. I’m going to go ahead and throw a link up here for my referral code in case anybody is interested in signing up for Spanning Sync. You might as well save 5 bucks while you’re at it and make me 5 bucks as well, because despite the fact that I’m supposed to be a rich lawyer, there’s a good chance I’ll be paying back my student loans well into my 50′s.

What’s the reason for this? Spanning Sync says:

Why are you doing this?
Since we launched Spanning Sync in March 2007, we’ve never done any paid marketing: no ads, no conference sponsorships, no press releases, no laptop stickers, nada. Just a two-page website and a blog. But in spite of that, Spanning Sync has seen great success, due mostly to the fact that our customers recommend Spanning Sync to their friends and colleagues. So in addition to saying “thank you” we’ve decided to actively invest our customer community with “Save 5+Make 5″.

My guess is that, in light of the fact that Calgoo has gone free and Google is beginning support of CalDAV, they are feeling some pressure.

I might give Calgoo a try before I paid for Spanning Sync, since it’s free. I’ve never tried Calgoo, so I can’t vouch for it. I’m definitely a believer in Spanning Sync, and have been using it effortlessly and flawlessly for the last 8 months. Google’s free CalDAV support could be the killer gCal/iCal sync solution, but for now it’s way too buggy to depend upon for a law practice, IMHO.

Spanning Sync 2.0 (presently in beta) does offer Address Book/Google Contacts sync, though, which I don’t believe Calgoo offers. At present, however, I’m not sure how much better it is than Address Book’s built-in ability to sync with Google Contacts. The killer feature, for me anyway, will be the ability to sync specific groups of contacts from Address Book to specific groups of contacts in Google Contacts. Charlie Wood, from Spanning Sync, says they’re looking into that feature, but it’s not planned for the 2.0 release. No word on exactly when it will be coming. For me, that may well be enough to keep me on as a paid subscriber in 4 months when my subscription runs out.

Hit the banner above or in the sidebar, or: Click here to save $5 on Spanning Sync!

DAV’s Not Here, Man (But It Almost Is…)

EsquireMac — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:51:19 +0000

If you sync iCal and Google Calendar, you know that up until now, basically your only choice was a paid solution. I wrote extensively about our firm’s calendaring solution recently.

Well, today I read that Calgoo is changing its business model to be ad supported, meaning that, as of July 22, 2008, it is free. Calgoo will sync not only sync iCal and Google Calendar, but also a whole host of other calendars – Mac, PC and Linux.

In even more exciting news this afternoon, I read on Cnet’s Webware that Google Calendar now supports CalDAV. According to Cnet:

Mac users who use Google Calendar and iCal to manage their on and offline calendaring have had to use a myriad of third-party products to keep the two in sync. That’s changed now that Google is including CalDAV support as part of Google Calendar’s built-in functionality. This means you’ll be able to make changes in iCal and have them instantly reflected in iCal and vice-versa. Previously that data swap was a one-way affair, with users simply subscribing to their Google Calendar feeds in iCal.

CalDAV is a standardized sharing protocol, allowing you to access the same set of data with others to edit and sync data changes between multiple users. On a workflow level, this means people with access to edit your Google Calendar will be able to make changes in both iCal and Google Calendar that will sync up with both.

Cnet does warn, however, that the CalDAV for iCal is not officially supported by Google at this very moment, and that there is a long list of known issues. So, you may want to hold off just a bit while they work out the kinks.

I haven’t tried out Calgoo or Google Calendar’s CalDAV yet. Given that I still have until the beginning of 2009 before my paid Spanning Sync subscription runs out, I think I’ll stick with that until then. But, I am super excited to try out Google’s CalDAV solution.

Gratuitous, barely related, but funny, clip of the day: DAV’s not here, man (yet).