Organizers' Collaborative

Yesterday, just as I was closing in on a 12-noon deadline for submitting a proposal online, my Google-hosted e-mail slowed to a crawl. Normally that's not too much of a problem. But now I needed to download several faxes (in PDF) that I received from OneBox and RingCentral accounts and then upload them again. But opening the e-mails was taking minutes (yes, after clicking once, I'd stare at the "still working" message highlighted in a depressing yellow-orange at the top of the screen). The downloading of the PDF attachment would take forever, coming in bit-by-bit at 1.8 Kb/sec on my 3.0Mb DSL connection! With less than 20 minutes to go, I realized that my netbook some 10 minutes away in another office had my Gmail accounts hosted offline via Google Gears. After a mad dash through downtown Boston, I had 5 minutes to go. The netbook was in sleep mode and booted almost instantly... And yes, those attachments had been synchronized via the recently enabled "offline" setting. At 11:58 a.m. the proposal was submitted! At which point my superego and manager began its lecture about time management.

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It is worth noting in the age of cloud computing that there are many different kinds of services available to synchronize web-based content offline. One of the more useful ones that I use to keep my netbook, notebook and different home and office computers on the same "page" is My DropBox. Window Live is available offline, Gears in cross-platform, Adobe AIR has several offline widgets for flash (including YouTube) and other content. Of course, there are plug ins and clipping services for many web browsers--particularly for FireFox--to allow offline access to saved web content.