Staying Online
Saturday, February 25th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
The first documented bug for Office 2.0 is that it does not work if you’re offline. Then the challenge quickly becomes: how can one stay online most of the time? Last week’s experiements with mobile blogging lead to mixed results: I could make a post, but it was one of the shortest I ever made, for the lack of a proper keyboard. An other solution would be to get an Internet connection through my cellphone over Bluetooth, but a friend of mine wasted a whole day of work trying to set this up with his Apple PowerBook. He finally managed to get it to work, but with a bandwidth lower than what I had with my 56 kbps modem ten years ago. The best solution I can think of right now is to get one of those PC CARDS for wireless Internet access. For example, Cingular sells the Novatel U730, which promises 400 to 700 kbps on 3G UMTS/HSDPA networks and 70 to 135 kbps on EDGE networks. It’s not certified for Mac OS, but several people seem to have found ways to make it work. I think I will give it a try, and in the meantime, I will listen to the Bee Gees’ Staying Alive.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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It sounds like we need something like IMAP as we have for email. All my emails are stored on a server and cached on a client. If I don’t have a connection, I can still access everything and it is updated when I have a connection again.
The problem however could be with inconsistencies that occur when for instance your secretary is updating your online calendar and you are planning something as well offline. But I guess one has the same problem with a traditional pen and paper agenda ;-) Perhaps a SVN-alike system to solve conflicts would come in handy…
Lee,
Based on my experience, synchronization is a very difficult problem to solve, and never works fully, hence does not work at all, for you cannot trust your data anymore. Unless you’re using a single OS platform that natively supports advanced synchronization mechanisms through the use of online services, such as Mac OS X with iSync for example, getting it to work for end users is close to impossible. My recommendation is to go for a much simpler solution: get good communication devices that will keep you online most of the time, and learn to do something else when you’re offline, such as reading a book or taking care of your family.
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