The internet-centric approach »

FERDY CHRISTANT - MAR 12, 2007 (02:31:43 PM)

It is no secret that the company I work for envisions an internet-centric approach towards IT strategy. The idea behind such an approach is that given any client, and a working internet connection, one should have access to the most important applications required to do the job.

With 4 PCs/laptops in the house, and even more that I use outside of it, my need to personally follow the internet-centric approach was painfully obvious. Last weekend I took the plunge.

I use Thunderbird for all my non-work email. I love it, it's lightweigth, user-friendly, secure and can holds all my email accounts. However, it has no place in an internet-centric approach. I should be able to access my email anywhere, not just on the single desktop I chose to install it on. Therefore, I switched to Gmail, knowing that it can now access POP3 email. Gmail works just fine but is a bit limited compared to Thunderbird.

Next was my RSS subscriptions. I use FeedDemon as my RSS reader. Feeddemon is great, but I hardly ever use any of its advanced features. Therefore I switched all my feed reading to Bloglines. This switch was easy, by export my OPML from Feeddemon, and importing it back into Bloglines.

To manage my productivity, I follow the GTD concept, I even built a Lotus Notes tool to manage my workload like that. I run one instance for work, and a seperate instance for non-work. I moved the non-work one into Google Docs. I lost a lot of functionality in this switch, but for now it seems like a workable solution.

Those were the major things I wanted to get off the desktop, onto the internet. I did lose some functionality, but to me the advantage of being able to access anything anywhere weighs out the lost functionality. One thing I have no solution for yet is storage. I need a lot of file capacity and have no problems hosting most of it on the internet so that I can access it anywhere. However, the solutions I saw were too expensive to scale with my demand. I may resolve to setting up an internal file/FTP server in my home network and make it available to the internet securely, but I dislike the responsibility of managing all that myself. It's another thing to worry about, and I have plenty of those already. I'm talking about 300GB here, possibly scaling up to 1TB.

Note: Earlier, I have already internet-enabled my source code management, using Subversion. I can work on my code anywhere in the world, on any machine. Bug/issue tracking I do with Mantis. Both are awesome tools. And finally, blogging I do with Blogo.

The only downside to this whole internet-centric approach that I can see is that it may make the work/private life boundary even more fuzzy.

General

Comments: 5

COMMENT: TANNY O'HALEY

MAR 12, 11:20:41 PM

comment » I have used web mail for years. It allows me to access email from home, work, a friends house, my phone, almost anywhere there's a browser available. I use a modified Task form in Notes for GTD and when they allowed me, I synchronized over the air with my Treo 650. Now that it's not an "approved" device, they took that away.

Bloglines has worked out for the way I read my RSS feeds. I like that I can read them on my Treo, at home, at work...

I've been wondering if I could synchronize My Documents to the internet so that it would be backed up and available wherever I am. «

COMMENT: ROSS HAWKINS

MAR 13, 10:46:27

comment » I've always been a bit wary of a completely Internet-centric approach.. all it takes is a few network outages before you realise the value of local resources!

On a random tangent, did you ever think about releasing your Notes GTD tool to the world? I'd imagine a few people out there would be interested in it.. «

COMMENT: FERDY

MAR 13, 12:05:13 PM

comment » Ross,

Good point. As for crucial files, I always make sure I have them locally available. As for email, RSS, etc...an outage can be joyful even

I have considered releasing the GTD tool to the public, but there's one problem. It is based on components developed at work, and it also has the look & feel of my employer's styleguide. I may disentangle the employer-specific parts in the future. I'm in doubt though, the tool is so simple that it would not take anyone more than a day to build the same thing from scratch. «

COMMENT: YOGI

MAR 15, 06:34:55 AM

comment » For the GTD, I'm using gubb (gubb.net), it's a kind of tada list on steroids. It may be not fit the GTD paradigm in its full manner, but it does the job.

There is also Gregarius which is a PHP webapp. A remplacement for bloglines. «

COMMENT: HENNING HEINZ

MAR 22, 22:33:03

comment » I also use Thunderbird as my preferred mail-client and it works great. But I use IMAP instead of POP. That gives me my folders, inbox and everything on every desktop that I run Thunderbird. And for pure web access I use Roundcube ( found at http://www.roundcube.net/ ). No matter what client I use, if it is a fresh install or not, perfectly in sync. So maybe your problem is not a fat client but not using IMAP. «