Because my current work style is very fluid, where I hop between my office and home PCs, a laptop, a netbook and an iPhone, it made sense to try and keep my data where I could access it regardless of device. I basically have 3 categories of data: email, my web browser environment (bookmarks, stored passwords, history) and unstructured data (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, JPEGs etc. files). I use a few cloud based services to supplement these, but more on them another time.

Documents: I’m fairly neat when it comes to organising data on my laptop. Everything is in the My Documents folder. I used to use Beyond Compare to manually sync my desktop and laptop but for the last while I’ve been using Microsoft Live Mesh Beta to keep everything in sync automatically. A change or addition on any system ripples around to all the rest in real time. This means I can start work on a document in the office and seamlessly pick up where I left off when I get home without having to do a thing. On the new PC I just installed the Mesh client and left it to do it’s thing over night. It pulled my data from the online copy and placed it just where I’d expect it.

Email: POP is for noobs; IMAP is king. Seeing as Google are generous enough to give away 7GB+ of email storage I’d be a fool not to use it. A few years ago (pretty much as soon as it was available) I created an @garypigott.net Google Apps account and shoved all my email up there. Right now there are 118,527 emails, occupying 2298MB of space, and vitally, it’s completely searchable in exactly the same way you’d search the web using Google. I access exactly the same data using Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, and the iPhone mail client.

Web Browser Environment: My browser of choice is Firefox,  which is handy a) because it’s multi-platform and b) because of Weave. Weave is an add-on that moves your bookmarks, history and passwords into the cloud. You can install the add-on on each of your computers, regardless of OS and everything is kept in sync. Weave is open source, so surely some enterprising and generous developer out there will churn out a Weave add-on for IE, Opera and Safari…

While push IMAP worked perfectly fine with our previous service, it’s a bit flaky on Gmail. We tend to see random disconnections without warning and the phone’s “reconnect every X minutes” function seems to be a bit of a crock and isn’t fixing it……

Outsourcing to a managed service provider is the only thing that makes sense if you’re small and have these functionality requirements. I could sign up with someone like Intermedia on a syndicated Exchange server for $125/month. ActiveSync (mobile device synchronisation) is another $2.95/inbox/month, and there’s loads more optional, but essential extras, like additional storage. Basically at the end of it you’re looking at €150/inbox/year, which is a big improvement, especially when it means that I’ve no hardware to manage, and no housekeeping to do.

Google have had their Google Apps for Domains suite out for a year or so now. You get Gmail with your own domain name instead of @gmail.com, a calendar app, a basic browser based word processor, presentation & spreadsheet app that allows multiple users update the same file simultaneously, and a Wiki. We started using it informally when they launched the “Team Edition”, that gave you everything but Gmail, so you didn’t have to move away from your email provider. The Premier Edition gives you 25GB inboxes for $50/inbox/year, and the standard edition, with conventional Gmail adverts and a 6GB inbox is free!

We went with Google and threw the switch last Tuesday and it’s bedding in nicely. Over the past week though a couple of “wouldn’t it be nice if…” things have come up:

• Full contact information, and not just name & email address would be good.
• Proper contact sharing would be nice. Contacts are shared, but only in as much as the auto-complete function can pull addresses from other employee’s address books when you’re composing an email on gmail.com.
• The ability to sync contacts with Outlook and mobile devices would be a huge step forward.

We’ve started to grow, both in head count and sophistication, so now we’ve got a lot more documents to manage and a lot more people wanting to manage them. Our documents are usually authored by one person, but in many cases require review and comment by sales, marketing and technical people prior to release. What would be great is something that would manage the workflow, with notifications and audit tracking, and integrate with our website to make the final result available to clients, all in a controlled manner. We need a Document Management System. Our company likes to use open source software wherever possible, so my first port of call was Google, which gave me the following:

• xinco
• contineo
• KnowledgeTree
• Epiware
• Alfresco

Most of the above are Java applications, which I really don’t like, and I’ll cover in a later blog post. KnowledgeTree is written in PHP and ticks all the boxes. Alfresco is a Java app, but it’s functionality is too good to dismiss straight away. Let the testing begin!

Because of this we had loads of different options if you needed email. You could use an “enterprise” platform like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and the like, or you could roll your own with any number of SMTP, POP or IMAP servers running on Linux (my preference right now is Postfix & Dovecot running on Debian).

Now days you can’t easily get away with the DIY approach. E-mail is has to a large extent replaced voice & fax as the prime business communication method. We need to support huge inboxes, instant delivery of messages, access on the road, and near perfect uptime and backups. Most of these things can be achieved with any modern email setup, however some require a little help from outside.

Remote access is a major requirement these days. An executive feels naked on the golf course unless he’s got a Blackberry, a Treo, a Symbian or a Windows Mobile smartphone on his hip (mine is a Nokia e61). You’ve got three options if you want to get email onto these things:

1. Scheduled checking of a POP/IMAP server: It works, but there’ll be a delay because the message doesn’t get pushed to the device as soon as it comes in.
2. Blackbery Enterprise Server: Native support for Blackberry units, and add-in support for other platforms. It only supports Exchange, Notes, or GroupWise servers though
3. Microsoft Exchange Direct Push: Native support for Windows Mobile units and add-in support for other platforms. Only supports MS Exchange servers obviously.

The other major issue is how to back them up. You not only have to worry about DR backups, but also compliance. A nightly backup isn’t good enough any more. You either need to run a continuous backup or run a parallel archiving solution.

At issue here is that the remote access and backup requirements require 3rd party support. 3rd parties target their efforts where they’ll get the most business, so There’s no support outside the big three (Exchange, Notes & GroupWise). Nobody’s deploying new Notes or GroupWise installations anymore, so as much as I hate to say it, Exchange is the only option if you need to provide effective remote access and require effective backup.

This is easy as pie to set up in any desktop email client, but I check my email on the move with my Nokia e61, on my laptop when I get a chance to sit down, Outlook, Thunderbird, Outlook Express or Evolution when at one of my work desktops, and webmail everywhere else! Therefore I need the emails to be sorted on the server, before they get downloaded to an email client.

Sieve seems to be the tool of choice, but you have to compile it from source on Debian, which defeats the point. People use Debian because of it’s package management. I log into each of my servers each week and run “apt-get update;apt-get upgrade” and I know everything gets brought up to date. Having to manually track a specific application’s release cycle and bugs just makes things messy.

The search continues….

I’m back with Postfix/Courier-IMAP, but I’ve still got the original problem of synchronising calendars and contacts.

I setup courier-IMAP-ssl, postfix, procmail, and clamAV on my Debian Sarge server, used fetchmail to pull emails from Gmail, work and a few other places, and things were good. I had the same consolidated set of virus-free mail folders everywhere, it was IMAP so I had the choice of almost every email client on every platform when it came to reading email. For web caf????s and hotels, I installed RoundCube|Mail as a web front end (very pretty interface and it gets the job done).

That was fine for a while, but I’ve begun to rely more and more on the tasks, calendar, contacts, notes functionality of Outlook on my laptop to manage work stuff, and at this stage it’s key to my daily work. It’s always backed up, but I need a way of accessing it in the same way I access my email. I need the same up to date copy of the data wherever I go, with whatever device I’m using. At one stage I was even thinking of using Exchange! Buying in a server, Windows 2003 and a copy of Exchange was overkill, so I parked it for a while. I played with some Apache/webDAV based stuff that in theory allowed multiple Outlook instances to share data, but it still didn’t fix the problems of accessing the same data on PDAs, other OSs and no OS (web browser only). There are other web based groupware products (like eGroupWare, PHProjekt, Open-Xchange, Zimbra, SugarCRM etc.) but they either don’t connect to Outlook, connect poorly/incompletely, or have a payware connector (I’m cheap!).

A couple of weeks ago I saw a mention of Scalix on a mailing list I subscribe to. It’s a commercial product, but there’s a free, virtually feature-complete version available for sites of <= 25 users. It includes an Outlook connector that provides an almost perfect replication of Exchange’s functionality. It runs on Red Hat and SUSE, so there was a ???????0 cost to me! I don’t fancy running it on Fedora, don’t like SUSE, and don’t want to pay for Red Hat Enterprise Server (they make enough out of me in the office!) so I went for CentOS, which is a free unbranded version of RHES. Scalix needed a bit of persuasion to install. It actually refuses to install on any other distros, even if all the dependancies are there, so I edited the /etc/redhat-release to fool Scalix into thinking I was installing on RHES 4.