treo 650 sync to meetingmaker universal - success!

Last spring, I volunteered to be the MacBook Pro guinea pig at our office: the first one to move to the new Intel chip and all the delightful challenges the new chip presented. You see, my 12" PowerBook was in the midst of its death throes, and I just couldn't take losing days of data (in between backups) anymore. Much as I loved the take-it-anywhere size of the 12" PB, the overheating and constant crashing and general surliness of a machine that's lived beyond its time got to me. I was at the top of the list to get a shiny new MBP the day they were shipped.

The biggest hurdle at the time (the day the MBPs were delivered to the public) was that we at the office run MeetingMaker as our group calendar, and the Universal version of MeetingMaker wasn't released when the MBP was shipped. To satisfy my role in guinea pig-dom, I had to run two different calendar apps:

1. MeetingMaker - to participate in the group calendaring exercise at work
2. Palm Desktop Calendar - to have a portable version of my calendar on my Treo for those times (read: most of my life) when I wasn't carrying around my MBP

Quite a pain-in-the-ass setup, really, but after years of having my calendar at my fingertips, it was the only way I could respond properly to someone when they asked what I was doing Saturday next other than to shrug my shoulders and say "I don't have my calendar with me."

I got in the habit of reserving 15 minutes at the end of each day to pull up MeetingMaker and Palm side-by-side on my desktop and making sure they mirrored each other before synchronizing the Palm version to my Treo 650. Not a bad deal when the changes to my schedule were confined to just the upcoming week, but as we started scheduling more and more things weeks and months out, it was a pain to try to remember how many invitations I'd received in a given day and therefore needed to mirror in both apps before going home each night.

About 3 months into this setup, our IT guy announced the MeetingMaker Universal client had been released and I could go back to one calendar. I resisted taking him up on the offer because I didn't want to sit through hours of downtime because so many times before it'd been an ugly mess when trying to sync one calendar program to another.

Now, it's five months later, and I've just installed the Universal client. And I've just sync'd my Treo directly to MeetingMaker with great success (it only took me 15 minutes to clean up all the dups).

I'm giddy knowing I've just reclaimed over an hour of productivity each week now that I no longer have to mirror two calendars.

Now, if I could just figure out those damn S01, S02, S03 files... I have it on reliable source they're generated by SnapperMail, though. Maybe I'll spend my bonus hour poking around the site for info.