How to Synchronize Your Work and Home Calendars

The facilities within Mediabee that make it easy to synchronize your home and work calendars are:

• Email Change Notifications
• Mediabee Web Access
• Mediabee Mobile Voice Access

Email Change Notifications: Synchronizing with Outlook

You probably have MS Outlook or Lotus Notes at work and are wondering what the best way to synchronize your home and work calendars is.  At Mediabee, we've created what could be one of the best solutions for this.  We're pretty certain that you don't want all your home calendar entries on your work Outlook.  Conversely, your spouse doesn't want all your work entries on your home calendar.  Conventional synchronization solutions don't provide elegant, usable ways to deal with the problem.

Mediabee believes that the best way to deal with the problem is as follows.  Keep all your home-related entries on Mediabee.  If you're at work, use Mediabee Web Access or Mediabee Mobile Access to view, edit, and add entries to your home calendar. 

Through Mediabee's Email & Cell Phone Reminder facility, you can receive emails  every time a change is made on your home calendar.  This can be set up on a per-user basis, and you can have changes just for one person or for all persons sent to an email address.  Along with the change email, a VCAL entry is attached.  This would allow you to download each change into MS Outlook with just one double-click.

So let's say you're going to go on a business trip.  Your family wants to know about it.  So instead of making it on your work Outlook, make the trip entry, say, "Trip to Cincinnati, June 5-June 10", on Mediabee. (You can do this through Mediabee Web Access or Mediabee Mobile Voice Access.) You'll immediately get an email at work, and you can double-click that onto your work calendar.  Now your home and work calendars are synchronized.  

The nice thing about this is, your spouse at work could get the same notification and update her calendar that way as well.

Mediabee's solution requires a minor adjustment to the way you think about synchronization - but you're going to be far happier with the result, because you'll have far fewer synchronization headaches this way.

Setting Up Email Change Notifications

Make sure you set up your Email Change Notifications correctly.  To do this, you'll choose Settings->Email and Cell Reminders or "Synch up work and home calendars" on your Welcome menu.  You'll need to set up the following.

• Synchronization - For each user, choose whether to send changes by email, and select whose changes should be sent
• Settings - For each user, provide email address to send changes to and SMTP server settings

Mediabee will use your own email service provider to send these messages.  If you have a free Yahoo or Hotmail account, you can receive the change notices at that email address; however, for Mediabee to send the emails, you will need to provide an SMTP server, user name, and password.  Most Internet service providers (ISPs) provide an SMTP server account.

Setting Up Email & Cell Reminders

You can set up the following email and cell phone reminders in Mediabee:

• Daily email reminder - Each user can choose to receive a daily to-do list of tasks and appointments, either for him or her alone or for all members of the group.
• Appointment email or cell phone reminder - You can choose to receive an email just prior to the occurrence of an event.

Synchronizing with a PDA

Mediabee does not currently provide a direct synchronization tool for PDAs.  If you're already using Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes, then use the method outlined above to synchronize your PDA.  To help us prioritize your needs in our development queue, please send a note to synchme@mediabee.com describing your PDA make and model and any specific needs.

Synchronization is one of the most challenging aspects of having multiple devices and applications for time management. At Mediabee, we don't wish to aggravate the situation by providing you with yet another method of synchronization. For this reason, we evolved the methodology that's outlined in the Synchronizing with Outlook section.

Mediabee Web Access

Once you've installed Mediabee at home, you can access it from anywhere using just a browser. Visit the http://mediabee.com/login page for Mediabee Web Access.

Mediabee Mobile Voice Access

Mediabee Mobile Voice Access is available only by invitation. If you want to be a beta tester of this, please send us a note to mobeta@mediabee.com to get on our list.  We will notify you as soon as we roll it out on a larger basis.