One of the biggest areas of office productivity is in scheduling your day, tracking your tasks and taking notes. Google has supplied a calendar system to keep your dates online and recently they have added a task list function. The integration of these into GMail is limited but works.

Calendar

In Calendar, you can do all the normal stuff you'd like to do, with daily, weekly, monthly views. Reminders can pop-up or be emailed. Calendar is pretty good about the basic stuff. Additionally when you are reading your mail with GMail, Google scrapes your messages and offers up potential calendar entries. On the side bar you can click items to add to your calendar. Your task list is also available from within GMail and Calendar.

Sharing of calendars is also supported. You can see other people's calendars laid over yours. You can invite people to meetings and sync your calendar to some mobile devices.

So those who want to divorce themselves from Microsoft Outlook, Google GMail, Calendar and Tasks can be used, all in the cloud. There are ways of getting your contacts from Outlook into  GMail contacts.

Google Notebook

Note taking is quite another story. Google has offered a great Notebook applications called of course Notebook. There was great Firefox support for it. In fact it still does exist, but is only available for those who were already using it at the time Google killed it. They aren't signing up new users for Google Notebook, but if you were fortunate to have created a Notebook a few months back, you can still use it. Although there will be no more development on the product.

I suspect Google is hoping you'll just use Google Docs and enter your notes in a regular word processing document. But it doesn't really compare.

EverNote

The user community is still wondering why Google dropped support for Notebook and many are looking for alternatives. One such product that offers free notebook services in the cloud is EverNote. In addition to entering your notes within their online web-hosted servers, they offer a downloadable client software program to enter and search your notes on your local computer and have syncing capability built-in. So you notes are sync'ed with your online account.

EverNote certainly does more than Google Notebook did and was a considerable challenge to Google. But Google notebook holdouts liked the integration with other Google services. Alas, Evernote has taken the market by storm and has accured many new users, many of which are former Google Notebook users.

EverNote also has Firefox browser integration tools, so all is not lost. In fact with the additional functionality and local storage of your notes, EverNote is really a much better solution. The service offers free use up to a point, with low cost premium service for largers users.

Security

One must consider how many places in the cloud you want to keep your personal data. If you have bought into the whole cloud computing paradigm, then you have already overcome the security fear of having your data on some other company's computers. So it's a matter of "Who Do You Trust?" Since you already host your email on someone else's servers, will you place your documents, spreadsheets on the same servers and would you place your daily appointments and now notes there also? Since I've decided to trust Google with my data, I'd have to go with them for most of my data. But I was a little shy to upload my personal notes to EverNote servers. Especially when my notes contained user account data, passwords, and proprietary information.

So I searched for a locally stored database note taker. I thought there probably is a FireFox extension to take notes. While I couldn't find one, I did come across a Wiki program that runs entirely within a HTML file. Say What?

TiddlyWiki

One of the most famous Wiki's is Wikipedia. The basic idea is to post up a repository of related information into web pages and allow editing of the data from within the web page from any registered user. Most of these Wiki tools ran on servers and stored the pages of information in a database. So wherever you hosted your web site / wiki page, housed your personal data.

I finally cam across TiddlyWiki, which didn't use a server or database and was designed to run in a web browser and using javascript would store any page created within the HTML file itself. In essense it re-wrote itself back to your computer hard disk after each change. This made taking notes within our single application, FireFox, easy, secure and very powerful. It doesn't have the polish of EverNote, but it allows great freedom in formatting your notes and links between them. You do have to learn a Wiki language to fully appreciate the capability of TiddlyWiki.

The clincher for me were some plug-ins to TiddlyWiki that offered yet additional features, the one of interest was a data encrypter plug-in. This allowed me to password protect any particular wiki entry. I entered my web site account passwords and set up the password encryption. When TiddlyWiki saves the data to the harddisk, that particular 'tiddly' is saved as a bunch of random looking characters. So if my tiddlywiki html file was to be lost or stolen, my password data is protected. Cool huh? In fact, now I can upload my TiddlyWiki note file to any ftp server for safe keeping and be assured my private notes are secure. Of course I don't need to encrypt all my notes, just a couple of them.

Summary

So while I keep my e-mail, calendar, task list on Google, I keep my personal notes on a local USB Flash Drive using TiddlyWiki with the encryption plug-in. I know using this Wiki a little more than the average office worker is willing to do, but it is there. EverNote would be the better solution for a web-based notetaker and still runs inside our Mission Impossible paradigm.

Before we get more into web applications in the cloud, I want to go through my recommended Firefox extensions. Since we use FF for our single all purpose tool for computing in the cloud, we need a few plug-in enhancements to Firefox called Add-Ons.

Adobe Tools:

First you can add the Adobe Acrobat Reader and Flash Player to your browser. These are almost mandatory software downloads on any new computer. Documents are universally exchanged in PDF format and Flash seems to be the runaway leader for embedded multimedia playing for your browser.

Browser Tools:

The Firefox browser itself can be enhanced to work better. I like "AdBlock Plus" for removing those pesky and bandwidth hogging ads. I do add exceptions for some of the pages I frequent, so the website gets to earn revenue for displaying ads when I visit, but as I normally visit lots of pages, blocking ads helps keep the bandwidth usage down on my EV-DO account. There is also a nice bookmarklet called "Readable" that grabs the main text of any page and pops it up to a larger font size for us age-challenged eye-strained old-timers.

Google Tools:

Keeping my bookmarks available for all my computers entails keeping my bookmarks online somewhere. "Google Bookmarks" seems as good a place as any, I can place a bookmark gadget on my "iGoogle" home page and can add the "GMarks" extension to FF to gain access to my cloud based bookmarks via a nice drop down GMarks menu that can replace FF's built-in bookmarks function. Adding the "Google Bookmarks" bookmarklet to my FF Link Bar, allows quick addition of pages to my list. Lastly I've added something called "Google Redesigned" from Globex that skins GMail, Calendar and Reader to a much nicer color scheme.

Mini-Apps:

For text editing, I've added "Codetch" as my HTML programmers editor. It runs right in FF and can perform most of my editing needs. For file transfers I've added "FireFTP" to use for updating websites I maintain. If you are into IRC chat, the add-on called "Chatzilla" is a clear winner as it has a clean interface and pops up in a new window and just works well inside the Firefox application.

Vendor Tools:

If you want to use EverNote for notetaking (covered in a later post), then a FF extension is available for that too. Of course WordPress, the CMS software used on my blog has a "Press This" bookmarklet that helps me post articles from other websites into my blog quickly.

You can search for any and all of these extensions. Many are available by going to the FF  Menu --> Tools -->Add-ONs, but the bookmarklets have to be gotten from the respective websites. Get what you can and we'll be ready for exploring more cloud application in a future Mission:Impossible installment.

With Google Docs you can replace your Microsoft Office applications and do everything on Google! That's what Google wants you to believe. And in most cases you could perform almost all of your office tasks with Google Docs. While I'm sure there are still features in Word, Excel and Powerpoint that Google Docs (documents, spreadsheets, presentations) still don't have, I am trying to use them first when needing these tools.

Google Docs will import your current Microsoft formatted files and give them to you in your browser for further editing. The conversions are sometimes sloppy, but you could clean them up a bit, before continuing on. You can export your Google Docs file back to a standard Microsoft file format although you might lose some formatting there as well, as Google warns.

I guess I'd recommend using Google Docs if you don't have to move back and forth, into and out of Word or Excel very often. You need to commit to Google Docs and try to use it for all it's worth first. Immerse yourself into it and you'll learn how to perform all the tasks you had with Microsoft Office.

Documents, spreadsheets and presentations are handled via an integrated web-based interface and file browser. Outlook functions however are split between several different Google tools. Of course we covered GMail last time, but the calendaring and meeting scheduling functions are handled by Google Calendar. It's a different app, but easy enough to get to from other Google Apps. This will be covered in another post.

Google Docs' biggest benefit however is the sharing capability. Google has numerous presentations to show how this works, so I'll not go into it here, but suffice it to say you can create a document on Google, then share it privately or publicly, and allow multiple people to edit the same document in real-time. You can collaborate together editing the same document and chat between editors while working on the document. I'll cover Google Talk in a future post.

So rather than create a document, attach it and send it onward to others for review, you send a link to the document on the web. This take a little getting used to, but once learned you'll actually achieve faster edits because all editors can work on the document at the same time instead of passing it around and trying to combine changes later.

Once again, having Google host your documents can be a security concern, but Google has incorporated reasonable security tricks to keep your documents from prying eyes and limiting the viewing and editing to those you authorize. The biggest benefit is that you can go anywhere, use any computer and get to and edit your documents with the least amount of computing power and applications loaded on the system.

Sharing a presentation on the web is another great feature that Powerpoint would have a hard time achieving.  Once your slide show is produced with Google Docs, you are immediately ready to publish it and present it to your clients.

As with all of the web-based applications we'll be using, they are automatically updated to the latest feature set, are virus free and "Free Beer" FREE.

If you have created your GMail/Google account you already have access to Google Docs, so give it a try.