The way I use my desktop and laptop computers makes it critical to me to have access to my current contacts/calendar/tasks/email wherever I am. At home, that's with my desktop machine, and I don't use my laptop there for my work in Entourage.
Just before leaving home, I use Synchronize! Pro X to put the newest copy of my Main User Identity Folder on each of the two machines. When I return home, I do the same thing. If I've not used any MS Office components, the Synchronization utility has no trouble accomplishing this, as long as I have Notifications turned off. If notifications are turned on, the activity of the database daemon changes the file modification date/time stamp so that the synchronization utility can't pick the newest copy of the data correctly. Consequently, I don't use notifications. However, even THIS isn't bulletproof, because if I open an Excel, PowerPoint, or Word file on the "wrong" machine, even THAT resets the file modification flag on the "Database" file. So, I'm wondering if it's possible to use some combination of Automator and AppleScript to make this work better. My idea of the workflow would be something like this (just before leaving home): 1. Quit all Office applications on the desktop machine. 2. Turn off the Database daemon on the desktop machine. 3. Mount my laptop's drive on my desktop machine as a network drive, selecting the appropriate partition to mount and filling in my password. 4. Launch and run the synchronization utility. Once I've done this, I'd be able to use Office apps on the laptop until I return home. Since this Automator action or AppleScript would run FROM the desktop machine, I think I'd have to turn Notifications on manually on the laptop. I know very little about AppleScript and Automator, so I don't know if I could design in some alerts; e.g. a popup that says "make sure you turn on Office Notifications on the machine you'll be using now" as the last step of the Automator Action. When I return home, I could run a simpler Automator action on the laptop that would Quit from all Office Applications on the laptop and turn off the Database Daemon, after which I could run the first Automator action from the Desktop. The one step that I've not included in this is turning Office Notifications ON after synchronization on the machine I'll be using. It would be great if that could be included in the action. Would it be possible to have a single Automator action do ALL of this (that is, on both machines)? Am I clear about what I'm trying to do, and why? (People have sometimes said to me "Why bother with this: just get an IMAP account!" but that won't work for me because often I catch up on reading my email when I don't have internet access; e.g., on a plane). Thanks so much Jim Robertson -- -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
