Back and forth: My data is trying to find a home

photo credit: swanksalot

I have now officially flipped back and forth twice in regards to housing my contacts, emails, files, pictures, and videos between the cloud and my laptop.  Hopefully this last switch will end this crazy cycle of back and forth that is really a hassle.  It is my own fault… I’m fickle and a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to my computing environment.  But now it is time for me to take a breath and relax.  After all, Google will take care of me, right?

Let me take a step back and explain.  See, I am a big fan of Microsoft Office.  I have owned every version to come out since 1997 and currently still do much of my work in Office 2007 (yes, I am a fan of the “ribbon” interface).  But obviously the issue lies when I am away from my laptop and want to access my documents.  Same thing for email – I love Outlook (I know, don’t make fun of me) because of the power it has to bring everything of mine together in one place: inbox, calendar, tasks, files, etc.  But because the issue of needing to access anything from anywhere at anytime, I moved to the cloud earlier this year.  I went with Google and thought I was happy.

I mean, I was happy, for the most part.  But looking back now I see that I had moved back to laptop applications because I was not properly utilizing the online tools (or just was plain using the wrong ones) so I was quick to move back to what felt good – my trusty Office applications.

Then came the Palm Pre… and Robert moving back to the cloud.

The Palm Pre was probably the answer to all of my problems.  See what the Pre does really well is integrate the web into your phone by using the “Synergy” features of the WebOS operating system.  One of the ways it does this is by bringing all of your web services together, and the main one it ties together is… you guessed it – Google.  So back to the cloud I went, but this time I made sure I researched which applications would benefit me the most.  Because of the integration with my phone, the sole device I carry every where I go, Google is the main provider of all of my online tools and email/file storage.  While I still have reservations about Google agreeing to hold all of my information and data for free, it is working well.

Now I just have to convince myself to not move back to Office in three months.

Robert Stanke (RobertStanke.com) is a Social Business Strategist, Internet Marketing & Community Management Professional based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Robert’s experience spans small business to enterprise-level social marketing execution.  In addition to supporting many consulting contracts, Robert is also the Interactive Community Manager for Life Time Fitness in Chanhassen, Minnesota.

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Tagged as: cloud, Data, Pre