Before: One agenda that contains both work and personnal information hosted in Outlook at work. I synched it with mobile device over USB or bluetooth. Pros: one agenda with all my appointements and todo in one place, can take it with me on my phone, nothing in the cloud (no “corporate” securiy issue). Cons: Mixing both professional and private appointments, I can not share it, no access control (my management could see my personal appointment ?).

Problem when moving in the cloud: With Google Calendar my agenda will be hosted in the cloud, in the Google cloud… It is my call to decide to host my agenda on their datacenter but I can not do the same with my work agenda. Legitimately the company I am working for is not so keen of the idea of pushing sensitive information on an external service.

After: The better solution seems to be handling two calendars separately:

• Personal calendar hosted in Google Calendar: it is now accessible from anywhere and on any device through the web based interface and I can share it with my relatives. Also Google provides a Exchange server wich makes it easy to integrate this calendar into tools.
• Work agenda remains on Outlook at work and I synch it over USB/bluetooth with my phone. Nothing in the cloud.

How to:

1. Google provides a tool to synch your Outlook with Calendar (synch 1 way or 2-ways). I used it to push all my agenda to Google Calendar.

Side note: Yes, I am PC user by default, but I have no technology religion and could move to another platform anytime if needed. Actually having most of my datas in the cloud is just easing this process.

Coincidentally I have been playing around with an Android phone and it appears quite obvious now that any Google user will end up as an Android user (if it is not done yet).

Right now I am trying to find the best possible way to move and manage my agenda with Google Doc, Outlook, my phone… more on that later.

One more thought, I might be about to fully trust Google but I am still wondering if the monopol they are building up on the internet is not dangerous.

[...] Vivek Kundra, Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, has decided to switch the District’s 38,000 employees from the installed Microsoft Office suite to the Web-based Google suite [...]

This news comes only a few weeks after Richard Stallman (GNU founder) warned about Cloud Computing… Guardian: Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman:

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control, it’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

Well an US government agency is using US company infrastructure… so far so good.

Should “cloud computing” becomes trendy, and it will, I wonder how non-gov companies are going to address that privacy issue and I wonder if Washington state would have done the same choice if Google was not an US company ?