Cloud based Tools

Cloud-based tools make keeping contacts, calendars, and other data synced across all your mobile devices and PC platforms a lot less difficult than you might expect. People are no longer tied to a specific location or device as they roam about working on laptops, tablets, or even smartphones. The challenge is to keep everything synced so you can access the same data from each of the platforms you use.

Default systems are in place for some platforms. For ex ample, smartphones and tablets running Google’s Android operating system work best when they are connected with Google services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Contacts. BlackBerry devices work best with BlackBerry Enterprise Server. And Microsoft Windows Phone 7 devices work best with a Microsoft infrastructure.

If you use Microsoft Exchange Server or Office 365, keeping your data synced is relatively simple. Exchange Server maintains the e-mail messages, contacts, and calendar information, so you can ac cess the data from pretty much anywhere and any device. Laptops can connect to Exchange over any Web connection, and most smartphones and tablets can stay synced using Exchange Active Sync. BlackBerry smartphones and tablets use Blackberry Exchange Server rather than Exchange Active Sync.

If you are not using Exchange Active Sync, or if you need to keep data in sync with another PC, the above solutions won’t help. For both iOS devices and secondary PCs, the easiest path to syncing runs through Google.

If you rely on Gmail, Google Calendar, and Contacts rather than on e-mail, calendar, and contacts maintained locally, as with Microsoft Outlook, you don’t really have multiple copies of the same data to keep in sync. You can simply connect to the Google data from your various devices, and any changes or additions will occur the Google service itself, so they will be refl ected when you connect from another device.

If you use Microsoft Offi ce and Outlook, Google Apps Sync for Outlook will sync your e-mail, contacts, calendar, and notes between Google Apps and Outlook—but you must be a paying customer of Google Apps.

Alternatively, Google Calendar Sync will perform two-way syncing between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook. You can set up e-mail on multiple computers as long as you configure each system to leave messages on the server as well, so they can be downloaded at each location.

As for syncing contacts, software can help. For example, using a product like Sync2 ($30), or gSyncIt ($20) for each system that you want to keep in sync will ensure that changes and additions on one PC will make their way to the other computers.

With your data synced to google, you can then set your iPhone or iPad to use google sync for e-mail, calendar, and contacts so those platforms will have access to the current, synced data. Google uses Exchange Active sync, so you add google sync to your iOs device as if it were an Exchange e-mail account, and then set your calendar and contacts to update using google sync.

Keeping spreadsheets, presentations, and other data synced among devices can be more challenging. such files can also quickly exceed the storage capacity of mobile devices, many of which have a meager 8gB or 16gB of storage.

Carry it with you: store your files on an external usB hard drive or thumb drive that you carry around.

Use the cloud: the most elegant solution is to use cloud-based storage, such as Microsoft Windows Live skyDrive or google Docs. then, as long as you have an internet connection, you can access the files from anywhere.

Ideally, you want to work offline when necessary and still have the data stay in sync. skyDrive provides a Microsoftcentric solution. When you use Windows Live Mesh, data automatically syncs from the desktop to the cloud and Windows Phone 7 smartphones integrate with data stored on skyDrive, too.

Google doesn’t offer a way to work with google Docs offline (though such a capability is expected this summer), but tools from Memeo can provide offline access to google Docs data. And the free google Cloud Connect add-on lets you sync files from Microsoft Office software to google’s cloud.

You can also turn to services like Box.net, Dropbox, or sugarsync. With each of these, designated folders on the local desktop are automatically synced with the data that’s stored online.