Here's the situation.  I have a corporate email account on hosted exchange (Microsoft BPOS) and this is my work email, calendar, and contacts.  I also have a Google apps domain for my personal email, calendar and contacts.  I am a Google voice user and share my Google apps calendar with my wife.  It is essential that these calendars and contacts are the same.  I also have an iPhone that uses the exchange active sync connection and have to Goggle apps account setup for email only.

In the dark days of owning my blackberry, I tried to sync everything using the Google app on the phone.  The results were disastrous.  I had to undo the sync and restore from a backup.  I also received errors all the time saying that the contacts and calendar were being synched by another program (Enterprise activated) and could not complete or a duplicate would be created.  

This time around, I said that I need the application to reside my desktop to handle the issue.  I searched and searched for something free to do this but could not find it.  Add to the complexity that I am running office 2010 x64 edition.  This only further narrowed my options.

After searching for a while, I found Gsyncit. (http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/).  I read all about it and decided it was going to do everything I wanted it to.  The app is $14.99, but very much so worth every penny.  It took about 10 minutes to setup, and then I had some de-duplicating to do in contacts because the contacts between Google Apps domain and Outlook were already out of sync from me manually doing it when I remembered to.  The de-duplication process to about 20 minutes.  I have almost 300 contacts so not to bad.

But here's where I ended up after my $14.99 purchase and 30 minutes of work.  All contacts and calendars are synched between the two accounts.  If I make a change on my phone while I am on the road, it gets updated to corporate exchange.  Then when I get back to the office, I load Outlook and all those changes are synched back to the Google side.  I can also accept invitations from either of my accounts in any method I want.  Then changes are synched later when Outlook is loaded on my desktop.  Finally, since all my contacts are in sync, Goggle voice calls are very rarely unknown callers any more and I am no longer required to press 1 to accept the call of an unknown caller.

To be a complete nerd for a little bit, I have been trying to accomplish this for a very long time.   I have seen Gsyncit for a while but really didn't want to pay $14.99.  It has been a frustrating uphill battle to get these all in sync but now that they are, I feel major satisfaction.  

Microsoft is trying to kill public folders and make everyone go to SharePoint.  As far as mobile access to SharePoint went, it was rather bad.  Text only or a really small screen of the SharePoint page. Today I needed a way to make SharePoint pretty on an iPhone.  Basically more elegant than the text only version.  After some research, I found Moshare.  http://moprise.com/

Right now the program is free to download and use via the App Store.  I downloaded, installed and configured in under 10 minutes.  

The drawback I see is that all information is read only.  Which, let us be honest, if you are using your iPhone to access the site, do you really want to do more than read the info?  

Disclaimer: not every bank has this setup yet, my bank just happens to be leading the pack.  

I got my iPhone 4 about three weeks after it had been released.   I am finally one of the cool kids and I do not have a blackberry or windows phone anymore.  I installed my banking app and remembered someone telling me that their app allowed depositing of checks via the app by taking pictures.  Honestly, I thought this was the most useful thing to do with the camera and the iPhone in general.  

I get expense checks from time to time that are not direct deposited and my bank has no local branches.  Previous to the iPhone app, I had another bank locally, and I had authorized wire transfers between the two.  But this still required me driving a ways, depositing the check and then transfer the funds.  iPhone app comes along and this is not a problem any more.  I choose mobile deposit and take a picture of the front and back (which is signed with and labeled for deposit only into my account).  Funds are available immediately.  

To me, this is a game changer and should send banks into examining why they have so many branches when a smart phone could do a bulk of deposits for individuals.  Commercial deposits, well, not every solution is a good fit to every problem.   

The other night I was up late (imagine that), and I was tinkering with my phone and some possible cool apps.  I came across one of my all time favorite apps, QIK for my Blackberry.  QIK is really a website, www.qik.com, that allows you to stream live video from your video camera enabled cell phone.  I live streemed this video from my Phone and then it was automatically Published to the site.  You can also mark videos as Private, share them with specific people, or publish to several social networking websites. Your Live Streams are also archived.

If you are also interested in finding out more about the RoomAlert, check my blog or subscribe to the RSS feed.  I Should be posting about it soon.

Very Cool!

With over 100,000 IPhone Apps and more than 300 new apps created every day, it can be impossible to find apps that are worth the download.  Here is a list of my current top 10 favorite FREE iphone apps (in no particular order).

Urban spoon - Shake your phone and this app will suggest a local restaurant to eat at.  Sorted by city, type of food and price, Urban Spoon will serve up a world of choices.

Pandora - free internet radio.  This app will build a custom radio station based on your faviorite artists

Flixster - movie showtimes, previews and reviews

Shazam - need to know what that annoying song playing overhead at the grocery store is?  Shazam will tell you

USA Today - great news app.  Really like the daily pictures

AP Mobile - Another great news source

Kindle - plenty of free content, but great paid content as well

InstaPaper - find an interesting article on your computer?  Hit the Instapaper icon and that article will be formatted for the iphone and synched to your phone for reading at your leisure.

Toobz Free - hours of mindless entertainment

Boxed In - Great puzzle game