Outlook® 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies®

Chapter 16. Taking the Show on the Road

In This Chapter

• Synchronizing remote and mobile databases with the mothership

• Taking bite-sized data with you

• Accessing your data from the road

If you're like millions of other modern businesspeople, you are on the go, mobile, and remote. You might spend some of the day at the office, some traveling, and sometimes working at home or at a hotel on a laptop. You want access to your e-mail, your calendar, your contact database, and your task list. You want the away-from-office experience to be as close to an in-the-office environment as it can be. This is a holy grail ofsorts for the road warrior class.

BCM and a laptop (or a Tablet PC) give you a good way of making this happen — not perfect, but good. Because it is integrated into Outlook and separate from it, you can take BCM with you and access e-mail in other ways. We don't have room to cover how to access your e-mail on the road in this book. Check out Outlook 2007 For Dummies, by Bill Dyszel (Wiley Publishing) for information on that.

The Big Question to ask yourself is "How much data do I want (or really need) with me?"

If your answer to the Big Question is, "I want most of the same data as I have at the office," you need a full-fledged PC with you, in laptop or Tablet PC sizes. You can synchronize your BCM database onto the laptop, take the entire database with you, make changes, and add new data; and when you reconnect to the master database, it synchs all the changes made to both databases. ...