Sure, there's a feature in Palm Desktop 3.0 called file-linking that allows certain changes to be transferred to all the users, but it's cumbersome and very limited. In practice, only one person can make changes. Any group, from families, to sales forces, to law firms, that tries to keep its members organized with Palm devices suffers from this problem. Basically, group members are synchronized, but they're not in sync.

Here's the way it should work. Each person in a multi-Palm group should be able to identify several groups in his Palm organizer -- family, sales, and corporate, for example. Each event or address listing (and perhaps to-do items and memos as well) could be for that person only, or could be designated a "shared" item for one or more of the groups. When any group member makes changes to a shared item, those changes would automatically get transferred, through the family PC or the corporate LAN (local area network), to the other Palms in the group when any member performs a HotSync. The changes would be entered automatically, and the whole process would be almost invisible to the user. Like almost everything else about Palm organizers, updating of group events and address listings would become hassle-free.

This seems obvious to regular folks like you and me. We know that two heads are better than one. But Palm developers, until recently, seemed to feel that one head, alone with its Palm, was just perfect.

Poor solitary buggers. They need to get some friends, don't they?

Introducing WeSync
At last, it seems, they have. Enter WeSync.

WeSync is the trade name for an integrated set of tools that allows Palm users to share and update calendars and address books. It's the brainchild of WeSync.com, Inc., a software company based in Portland, Oregon, which rolled out a preview version of its software in October. I've been looking it over, and I like what I see.

WeSync provides the ability to keep members of a group in sync that I've been longing for. But WeSync has aimed much higher. The software also allows users to pull in information made available by third parties, such as airline and hotel phone lists, timetables for your local movie theaters and sports teams, or concert schedules, as you can see in Figure A. The list of items you can load into your Palm device this way seems endless.

FIGURE A

Aside from setting up your own personal and professional communities, you can also pull in information made available by third parties. Click picture for a larger image.