Access your stuff from anywhere

The exciting thing about the web to me is the growing ability to access your stuff from anywhere. Email went that route years ago, and now online email accounts provide so much capacity that you practically never have to delete anything. Yahoo mail gives you a gig of storage, and Google’s G-Mail offers 2.5 gigs, and these are free accounts. And since they’re web-based, you don’t have to change email addresses when you change Internet providers, which is why it amazes me whenever someone emails me that they’re changing from AOL to Comcast and their address is changing. Get web-based email and you can keep your address and collect your mail from anywhere.Anyway, now developers are moving beyond email to other applications. If you need a basic but very adequate word processor, writely.com has it for you (it’s free), and you can store all your documents online too. Then if you’re visiting your in-laws in Florida for a week and you want to do something productive, you can sign in to writely and continue working on your memoirs. Writely documents allow for collaboration too, which makes it useful for church ministry teams that need to work together to create an event schedule, a job list, nursery rotation, etc. You make the original and your team members can add to it at their own schedule, from home.

Along the same lines are some tools provided by 37signals.com. I especially recommend Backpack (a simple project organizer) and Ta Da List (a VERY simple to-do list). Both are collaborative, access-anywhere tools that could be very useful for the type of thing we do in church all the time - plan and work together in small teams. Try them out, let me know what you think, and if you know of other good access-anywhere tools, tell me about them.

January 3, 2006 · Filed Under Life, Web, Work

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