This article or even a note is unlikely to help many experienced users, but it may push someone to rethink their working space and save their time. Most of the solutions are widely and often used by many for solving everyday tasks, but I was very pleased with the result of applying these solutions, merged together, to organize your workplace, although it was not without drawbacks. So, I'll start.
Task
There is a desktop computer in the office, a desktop computer at home, a laptop and an Android phone. It is necessary to have some kind of common working space at home, in the office and on the phone with the following conditions:
- the maximum possible use of open source software, but under Windows;
- access to desktops on all computers;
- instant synchronization of working data between computers;
- Since I sometimes do programming, it’s necessary that work projects are available everywhere, including the launch environment and the development environment.
- general mail and the form of its receipt (with all tags);
- full synchronization of tasks and calendar in one program;
- Considering all of the above, you should avoid copy-paste and flash drives as much as possible.
This is all necessary so that reseeding from computer to computer would not have to copy something, check, switch. You just need to sit down and continue to work, as if I went to drink or smoke.
How I decided it all
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Access to desktops is built into Windows and, it would seem, what is the problem here. But I personally don’t really like the remote Windows desktop and it doesn’t work for Android (or I didn’t find an adequate application). And I would like to have access to your desktops and from the phone. Then TeamViewer came to my rescue. Simple, convenient, free for private use, when creating an account, you can connect all your computers to it and even close them with individual passwords. As they say simple and tasteful. The advantage is that the updated versions of the client come out almost every month. I did not find any serious disadvantages of this program.
Alas, instant data synchronization on different computers is unfortunately not achievable. DropBox and SugarSync synchronize quickly, but not instantly. Thinking, I decided that I would use both of these programs. DropBox is assigned to synchronize business data and distributed to colleagues. Now pivot tables in Excel can be viewed always and everywhere and everyone can edit them. The only drawback here is that you cannot simultaneously edit Microsoft Office documents, without the appearance of “conflicting” versions of files, which then have to be “merged” into a single working version, since this happens very rarely.
In addition, I set up a working scanner to drop scanned documents into DropBox, and now, even when I’m at home, I can ask my colleagues to scan me a document that is only on paper and get it quickly at home. Without unnecessary letters and unnecessary gestures (electronic documents, of course, better to throw an e-mail).
SugarSync took over the storage of personal data and the launch environment, and in particular Denwer. Frequent and especially fast synchronization is not necessary there, but places give out more. Thus, I received a single set of working files on all computers and a development environment, which I just need to run on any machine to start or continue working. Here, too, there is a minus of conflicting versions of files, but since I use SugarSync only for myself, there is no particular problem.
I know that there are Google Docs and working papers could be placed there, but unfortunately the colleagues would not have suffered such drastic changes, they would get used to DropBox for a couple of months.
Now by mail, contacts, calendar and tasks.
Since the phone is on Android and is closely tied up with Google-services, I decided to dance from them. Transferred all contacts to Google and finally put them in order, for further synchronization with the mail program and phone. I already had a mailbox on Gmail and I decided to completely move to it. I set up mail collectors there for all my other mailboxes and scatter letters into the appropriate folders.
As for the mail program, which was supposed to be free, with good functionality and work normally under Windows 7 and XP. Searching across the expanses of the Internet selected two candidates for the future favorite mailer: Evolution and Thunderbird. Forgive me Evolution lovers, but I didn’t like it. But Thunderbird was pleased with its additions, themes, simplicity and ease of settings.
I set up mail using IMAP, which took just a couple of minutes in Thunderbird, and there were a lot of pleasant surprises waiting for me, which I only dreamed of in Outlook. Mark the letter as read at once in all folders, color markers for letters are automatically synchronized, the overall usability and customizability of the interface for themselves and much more. I think many are already familiar with this program, so I will limit my joys.
But not everything turned out so rosy with the friendship of Google and Thunderbird. To synchronize contacts, there are several additions and not all of them work smoothly. So far I have stopped at gContactSync, as it synchronizes contacts to the maximum, including additional fields and fields with the names I created. But, for example, if a contact has several dates, then only one is synchronized, the very first one, which is not very convenient. Almost the same with email addresses and regular mail.
Using Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar, I set up calendar synchronization from Google and found out, to my horror, that it syncs without tasks. And tasks were needed and, it is very desirable that they were always synchronized between all computers and the telephone. After a fierce search on the Internet, I found an article “Cross-platform synchronization of contacts, calendar and tasks” on Habré written by recky, which described the appropriate method. Since everything was fine with contacts and the calendar, I used only the task synchronization advice via the
Memotoo website, which included an add-on for Thunderbird and the free package includes storage of 50 tasks, which fully satisfies my needs. I still get the tasks “in order not to forget” and delete them after they are done, so for me this is quite a normal number.
It remained to configure only reminders for dates and birthdays in contacts. Google Calendar’s birthdays picked it up normally, but I ignored the additional dates of events and special occasions, so I had to create a number of repetitive tasks in the calendar so that everything was normal and on time.
This is the end of this epic. Three computers now work as a unit and wherever I am, I can always continue to work from the point where I stopped. Mailboxes show the status of my letters, work files are always at hand and contain the latest changes, programming no longer requires dragging flash drives and any copy-paste. And the phone has become a much more useful thing than just a player-caller-camera in one bottle. And all this, given that I often work from home, and I often move from computer to computer in my house (a small child in my arms, I have to run), I began to save a lot of time and energy. I hope that you, at least in some way, the information from this article will be useful.