Prompted by an article on pastorhacks.net
I’ve been a Palm Pilot PDA user since my mom bought me one when I graduated from seminary. (Palm Vx, and awesome tool!)
The best feature of the Palm is the ability to have my contacts and calendar on my computer at home and also on a device in my pocket. Being able to sync to the Palm Desktop has always been a valuable tool for me.
But my contacts are not my own anymore—neither is my calendar. As a church planter, I’m facing a need to have my personal contacts synchronized with our church contacts and having my personal calendar sync with my church calendar. But there is just nothing out there to do both of those and sync with my Palm. I need a centralized database that is…
- Contacts & Calendars
- Updatable by members of our congregation
- Shareable with permission-based access control.
- Web-accessible
- pilot-sync-able
I’ve been looking for this for a long time and have had no luck. Actually, the only viable option I can find is to have an Exchange server paired with Outlook. Of course, that’s a hefty Microsoft tax that I don’t want to pay, and I don’t think it can be updated by users.
Here are some options I’m considering.
- ical exchange — allows for publishing public and private calendars from any ical capable calendar for others to subscribe to or view them online through a browser.
Any ideas?
Have you tried a trial run of dotMac?
I think it does most of what you want there…
If you had a Church dot Mac account, .Mac group, and allowed people access to the address book, etc, and then synced it, voila’ all the info stays updated on your computer/Palm
Right now, I heavily rely on dotMac- I see my Assoc Pastors calendar through it (and he mine), for awhile we were publishing our church calendar through it, I share my address book with him that way…
Check out .Mac (dotMac)
I think it will do everything you need…
Set up a group in dot mac, allow people access to the “church” address book, sync calendars through it…
I use this with my associate pastor and it works great. Doing it with a larger group wouldn’t be hard, and it’s (I think) exactly what the “group” feature on dot mac is all about.
And you can sync your palm with it 🙂
I didn’t know about .Mac’s sharing ability. Does a person have to have a mac to use the sharing feature, or is it web-accessible too?