#31 Get organized with Plaxo

One of the growth areas seems to be sites where you can set up organizational calendars, task lists etc for free. Remember the milk, Jotlet and Plaxo are ones mentioned in the learning notes and Yahoo and Google also offer options. I registered with Plaxo which seems to have the benefit of syncing with other programs such as Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. It also provides links and feeds to other places where you are a member, such as Flickr, Facebook. You can access your account through multiple PCs and get auto updates from the synced contacts. Although its origins may lie in being an address book and calendar, Plaxo seems now to be trying to become a social networking tool and I'm not sure it has a clear identity.

I signed up and immediately had my (not very many) contacts from Hotmail loaded. When I tried to get further contacts from Outlook I was told this was only supported by Explorer (I use Firefox). My links to Flickr etc worked fine. I moved on to the calendar and created a work calendar and a home calendar. It was good to be able to display both superimposed, though the functionality didn't seem as good as Lotusnotes or Outlook. One downside was that if you put something in the wrong calendar, you couldn't just change the calendar, you had to trash the entry and start again in the other calendar even those both were open at the time.

Syncing with Outlook for calendar and contacts then became a clear option, though I had to do a download and there were dire warnings about saving backup files so I didn't proceed. I am not sure why this didn't come up as an option earlier when I was trying to load contacts. I added and completed tasks. I searched icalshare.com and with difficulty found something I wanted to load: a list of Australian holidays. But then I couldn't do anything with it. Icalshare.com doesn't appear to be a site whose link is supported by Plaxo and Firefox didn't want to upload the link anyway.

Whilst I am sure that this is a good idea in theory, I don't fancy this as being much use to me or my colleagues. I need to use Lotusnotes as my electronic calendar at work as this is the calendar on which the organization operates. I already use Outlook at home and share my personal events with my work calendar by inviting my work persona to those events. And sometimes I do it the other way when something from work will impinge on the private. This usually works, though Lotusnotes can be a bit funny with accepting multiple day events from Outlook. If they all synced it would be fine, but I don't really want yet another calendar and address book, even if it is available via the web.