I work in a mixed pc/mac environment using an online task and project management tool, which offers some rudimentary milestone scheduling features, and we use Exchange 2003 for our email and calendaring. I know, its old, and its almost deprecated, but until we upgrade, its what we have. But even if we upgrade it doesn’t solve the problem.

The problem is in open standards adoption of CalDav on Windows/Outlook, and the Mac’s implementation of exchange calendars in iCal and Entourage/Outlook for mac.

Windows and Outlook

In Outlook for Windows, unless your using exchange, there is very little you can do out of the box to get a could synchronized shared calendar solution. Sure you can use google calendar with a plugin, but thats not really ideal now is it.

Mac and iCal

iCal is great and I love it, and use it extensively with MobileMe. I have a whole bunch of calendars synched with my iPhone for scheduling on the go, and i cant live without it.

What gets my goat is that it doesn’t support older versions of exchange. It also frustrates me when sending and accepting meeting requests to pc’s. Its either outlook on windows cant read or open them, or it doesn’t get my meeting request replies. I don’t know if this problem is solved with a newer exchange server or not, but at the moment, is killing me.

Mac and Outlook

I’ve played around with Office 2011 Outlook beta, and i love it. I love how similar to Outlook on PC, and its spectacular. My beef comes down again to the fact it doesn’t support older versions of exchange, and again it doesn’t support CalDav. So i cant get my google or MobileMe calendars on it. Which cripples it severely for me.

I know this is a bit of a rant at the state of things, but it doesn’t seem like there is any planned future updates for some applications to improve this. iCal for mac may get an update soon in the next Mac OS X update that might solve this. I doubt Outlook on Windows will start supporting CalDav anytime soon, coz they would have already. As for Outlook for mac, turns out they left out that feature on purpose because they wanted to concentrate on exchange functionality first. So it maybe an added feature in future update. But until then, i cant use it much.

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions on getting a working Mac/Windows shared calendaring experience going smoothly?

Whats even worse is getting your head back in to gear, and in to work mode. For me, this means logging in to a bunch of email and social networks accounts, as well as administration control panels. You think it’s all good, until you’ve locked yourself out of a whole bunch of sites, coz your mind is still in its zen and peaceful state, looking at blue waters and azure skies.

This is when I decided I might need a password manager.

I need something that :

1. has good encryption
2. can be used on multiple macs
3. possibly iPhone synchronization
4. can be used for more than just passwords eg: membership numbers, application serial numbers
5. easy and intuitive user interface (and I’ve very critical )

A quick search on Google, Versiontracker and a few review sites, I settled on trying out  1Password by Agile Web Solutions and Wallet by Acrylic.

Both applications are very similar animals, but have very different spots. They both have excellent encryption and allow you to store and retrieve login/passwords, serial, credit card and membership numbers and iPhone synchronization. Their similarity ends there though.

Wallet

Wallet has the simpler interface that looks very similar to Apple Addressbook’s 3 column interface. It starts you off with 3 folders/categories of information (Serial Numbers, Web Passwords, Credit Cards), but you can create your own custom categories as you please.

Creating a new entry under a category is as simple as clicking the plus sign under the selected category. Creating an entry under Web Passwords gives you standard fields of Name, Username and Password. You can add additional fields if you needed, but its pretty straight forward.

When it comes to retrieving web login information, Wallet makes it easy to automatically enter your saved credentials to a site by way of a menu bar applet. Go to a site you saved the login/password for in Wallet, and click the menu bar icon. Enter the master password you setup for Wallet, and it will insert the credentials in to the web form. I haven’t had extensive use with Wallet yet to talk much about it, but since I have multiple accounts on some sites, I’m not sure how it handles that.

When it comes to synchronization, Wallet uses MobileMe or a WebDAV server to sync iPhones and multiple computers. This means thats iPhone users have cloud access to their Wallet database, and don’t need to do much to sync their information.

Wallet looks like a great app, and for the $20 price tag, is pretty reasonable. Its got good features, multiple mac and iphone sync, excellent encryption and an easy to use interface.

1Password

1Password is a pretty feature rich application. By default, it starts you off with 6 categories (Logins, Accounts, Identities, Secure Notes, Software, Wallet), and has a plethora of predefined templates for storing information including email and instant messenger setups, text notes and identity persons.

My favourite feature is the browser plugin, that saves passwords as you type them in to web logins. This makes it a lot easier to save them, as its quite cumbersome to remember all your accounts and passwords at setup time. As you go through your daily routine and come to a web login form, fill it in, and the browser plugin will as you if you want to save it to 1Password. The plugin doesn’t stop there, enter your credit card information and create a identity profile in to 1Password and you can fill in registration forms or purchase forms with a couple of clicks.

Synchronizing multiple macs and an iPhone with one database isn’t as straight forwards as entering your MobileMe credentials in Wallet. The Agile website recommends you use DropBox to keep one database synced with multiple machines. DropBox is an amazing web service, but if you don’t have one, your gonna have to get one. iPhone syncing is through wifi, which means you have to manually sync your mac with your iPhone for the latest info.

1Password looks like the more power application, with great browser integration but I wish it could sync using MobileMe giving my iPhone cloud syncing. At $39.95, its price tag is pretty steep.

Final Verdict

So far both of them seem to be very capable and excellent applications. I will be using the trial versions for the next month to really make up my mind, and will write an in depth review of both soon.

Have you used or tried any of these applications? What are your thoughts, preferences? Are there better applications out there I might have missed? Leave me your comments!