Finally True Freedom
Posted by on May 15th, 2008
2008
May 15
After some self-debate I’ve decided to take the plunge and uninstalled MS Office from all our laptops and workstations at home.
We’ve switched to OpenOffice and I am so happy.
On top of that I’ve managed to make all our e-mails, tasks, calendars and notes accessible on any laptop and PC around the house actually anywhere we go as long as there is net access.
Thanks to Firefox, Google (Gmail, Notes, Calendar and Docs), Thunderbird and Lightning.
The only other thing I need to sort out is how to centrally share our contacts and address book. Originally we had a readonly PST file that was located in a shared folder. If one machine had it opened all the rest had to wait for it to be released.
So far the only viable option I can think of that is free is Plexo but I haven’t decided yet.
If you are interested in how I did it, it’s quite simple really, all I had to do was signup an account with Google and used that account on all our laptops and workstations. When one machine created an entry into the calendar it synced with Google Calendar which in turn synced the other machines.
Google notes on the other hand just required an add-on to Firefox, which is our preferred browser anyway.
As for the e-mail, instead of using POP3 I’ve decided to use IMAP at least that way mails are left at the servers and any machine can read them.
I will for sure donate more to the cause, long live OPEN SOURCE, long live GOOGLE!!!
We’ve switched to OpenOffice and I am so happy.
On top of that I’ve managed to make all our e-mails, tasks, calendars and notes accessible on any laptop and PC around the house actually anywhere we go as long as there is net access.
Thanks to Firefox, Google (Gmail, Notes, Calendar and Docs), Thunderbird and Lightning.
The only other thing I need to sort out is how to centrally share our contacts and address book. Originally we had a readonly PST file that was located in a shared folder. If one machine had it opened all the rest had to wait for it to be released.
So far the only viable option I can think of that is free is Plexo but I haven’t decided yet.
If you are interested in how I did it, it’s quite simple really, all I had to do was signup an account with Google and used that account on all our laptops and workstations. When one machine created an entry into the calendar it synced with Google Calendar which in turn synced the other machines.
Google notes on the other hand just required an add-on to Firefox, which is our preferred browser anyway.
As for the e-mail, instead of using POP3 I’ve decided to use IMAP at least that way mails are left at the servers and any machine can read them.
I will for sure donate more to the cause, long live OPEN SOURCE, long live GOOGLE!!!