Note Talkers

Tuesday morning I was actually considering a GroupWise to Outlook to MindManager to Project to SharePoint process! Combined with TaskBlaze, OneNote, FireFox, NewsGator, and a couple of PowerToys/Extensions.

Reality hit me that it was too complex and maybe I just need to go back to paper. When I went to DIY Planner, the first article was “That Sync’ing Feeling“…

You know the situation. You might have a Classic-sized planner stuffed with D*I*Y Planner templates. You tote a Hipster PDA in your guidebag or purse. Somewhere, there’s a Palm you sync with Outlook, online calendars or Palm Desktop. Then there’s the array of Post-Its cluttering your monitor, the stack of index cards by the phone, a Moleskine yearning to be used, a notebook you tote to meetings, and so on. Slowly, as you come across neat ideas to boost your productivity, you take on more and more ways of doing things, your system begins to fracture, and your trusted system erodes. And the single most important plea, among all the lone voices crying in the night? — “How do I make it all work together? How do I ’sync’?”

He goes on with several other comments, questions, and advice. One key point was a “trusted hub for each type of information”. Everyday I work with an Identity Management system that relies on what we call “Authoritative Sources” to send details to the meta-directory. Such as the HR system sends employee data, the email system uses that data to create accounts, then the email address is sent back.

I don’t know why I didn’t try this approach before. Well actually I do, there isn’t a program that can be a “meta-directory” and connect to all the programs I use. Especially GroupWise, which makes up a large chuck of my source for tasks but doesn’t have the extensibility that I am looking for. So I’ve tried countless other programs.

Today I’m going to have to evaluate my “Authoritative Sources” and figure out what my hub and spoke diagram should look like. More details soon…