ISSUE 561: July 25 2000
ALAN ZISMAN
It's easy to stay connected in today's
wired world
One of the (perhaps) joys of our digital
lifestyle is how you can go anywhere, taking your work with you, using
e-mail to remain in touch.
For many of us, the key to doing this is to carry a
computer everywhere we go. But you can still stay in touch even if
you're not hauling your own notebook along.
I'm assuming that if you're computer-less
(computer-free?), you still have access to an Internet-connected
computer at the other office, or at an Internet caf?, or even a public
library. You can now find a connected computer most places in the
world. And once you're on the 'Net, with a little preparation, you can
stay in touch and even access your key documents, address lists and
more:
-- Get a free e-mail account. Even if you rarely use
it, a free, Web-based mail account with
any of literally dozens of providers can be accessed from any connected
source. (Note that unless you clear the browser cache when you're done,
with some services, the next user may be able to click on the back
button and read your mail.) Before you leave, play around with the
filters in your e-mail software at work to automatically forward your
e-mail to your free account. Of course to do that, the computer at work
needs to stay on all the time you're gone, with the e-mail software
running.
-- Alternatively, check out a free e-mail gateway
service. Services such as Thatweb.com, Webinbox.com, Mail2web.com
and others can often be used to access your Internet e-mail from their
Web page.
-- Neither of these methods will give you access to
your stored e-mail address book, browser bookmarks or favourites, but
you can cheat the system. Copy essential addresses into a text document
and e-mail it to yourself. You can do the same with your schedule or
any vital documents. That way, you can access this information from any
system that gives you access to your e-mail.
-- Some documents, such as PowerPoint presentations,
don't translate well to the plain-text world of e-mail. No problem. As
long as you can get online, you can access any of a num-
ber of free disk space services. Set
this up before you go on the road and copy your documents online. Some
of these services are Freedrive.com (50 megabytes of free
space),
Myinternetdesktop (100 MB of space) and Xoom.com
(promising as much as 500 MB of space). Mac users can sign on with Apple's
iDisk, which is exceptionally well integrated into the Mac interface.
(Apple wants to limit it to Mac OS9 users, though ways around this
abound on the 'Net.) All of these services let you store copies of
documents online and then access them from any computer connected to
their Web pages. In some cases, you can keep some of your files private
while making others accessible to anyone, a handy way to let clients
access that PowerPoint presentation on their own.
-- Taking the free disk space idea one step further, Hotoffice.com
not only provides 40 MB of online
storage, it also offers an entire suite of useful tools such as a
sharable group calendar, online confer-
encing and more.
And that's not all. Freedesk.com and MyWebOS
promise complete office suites, online. Of course that means that you
are word processing at the speed of the Net, rather than at the speed
of your computer, so you're not likely to want to do this everyday. But
it's something on which the big players are keeping a close eye. Sun
is promising a Java-powered online version of it, while Microsoft
is hinting that it will be offering something similar with its Office
suite. And at June's PC Expo, Lotus promised online
rental, over Into Networks' Playnow.com Web site, of
its SmartSuite applications starting at US$2.99 for 48 hours use. The
company claims this "marks the first time applications from a leading
office software suite will be made available over the Internet with the
same robust functionality and zero-latency performance that is
available from packaged software."
Now, you may no longer need that notebook to take it
all with you. *
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