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View Full Version : Small-scale wireless calendar/contacts/website link?


Syrocko
08-23-2007, 06:09 AM
I am a self-employed massage therapist in England, but I use a third party company to book some of my appointments. I am looking for a way to achieve as much as possible of the following, as cheaply (Maximum budget £60 per month) and simply (I'm not the most technically minded person) as possible:

A) Make use of a sophisticated, reliable online calendar system to be accessed by myself and anyone else who books appointments for me, preferably with address book and note pad too.

B) Set up a continuous wireless sync between this calendar and a handheld (preferably my BlackBerry Pearl on the Orange network, since I'm stuck in a contract with them for over a year still)

C) Make it possible for visitors to my website to view a version of my calendar and see when I have space to book them an appointment, but without them seeing any names or details of my clients. I realise that this could be the hardest part, and may have to involve paying an IT company to engineer a system especially for the purpose.

It seems that many of the most popular services for this sort of thing, such as Yahoo Push Email, are not yet available in the UK.

At the moment I use a third-party BlackBerry programme from Handango to wirelessly sync with a Google calendar, but it's full of bugs, only syncs from time to time, is very data-hungry, and doesn't include notes or an address book.
The option I'm considering most heavily at the moment is with a company called ServeLogic, who apparently offer a hosted BlackBerry Exchange Service for £11.88 per month without me having to buy my own BlackBerry Exchange Server. Orange can then add BlackBerry Exchange Service to my tariff with them for £35 per month, which should enable me to connect to ServeLogic. However, this my be slightly pricey, and the ServeLogic don't offer a service for putting the calendar on my website this way.

So, I would be very grateful indeed if anyone is able advise me on what my best options are in this situation.

takeshi
08-23-2007, 09:26 AM
A) Make use of a sophisticated, reliable online calendar system to be accessed by myself and anyone else who books appointments for me, preferably with address book and note pad too.

B) Set up a continuous wireless sync between this calendar and a handheld (preferably my BlackBerry Pearl on the Orange network, since I'm stuck in a contract with them for over a year still)

Hosted BES with two accounts -- one for you and delegate access granted to the other person making entries for you -- would address these two points. The second account actually doesn't need hosted BES. It just needs to be another Exchange account unless you're ok with the person having full access to your account (in which case you could use just a single hosted BES account and have the other person use OWA to enter appointments).