Unfortunately, there's a lack of Macintosh support. As with the lack of Mac OS X support for Palm Desktop, the MyPalm portal (and AnyDay before it) has promised Macintosh support for some time. I am fortunate in that I have a spare PC in our home office that I can dedicate as a home HotSync application server for our family's Palm OS-based devices, so using the MyPalm portal is no problem.

Sharing with others
Key to Palm's vision for MyPalm's success is how easy it is for you to share data with others. Through a group, you can share calendar information, request that others share views of the free time in their calendars with you, and exchange simple messages. You can also publish calendars based on your personal calendar for others to view.

Groups
A MyPalm group is simply a group of MyPalm users that share a calendar and contacts. Figure C shows the home page for my family's group.

FIGURE C


Here's a MyPalm group home page. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Each member of a group can have one of three kinds of access: viewer, contributor, or editor. A viewer may view entries and invite new members. A contributor can do everything a viewer can do, plus create new entries and modify her own entries. An editor can do anything that a contributor can do, as well as modify any entry and delete members. As you might imagine, a group must have at least one editor in order to maintain the group.

Once you create a group, it's easy to invite new members. You can go to the group and click on Invite New Members. Then you fill out the form presented by the portal. This form is where you select the email address of the new member to invite, write the invitation, and select the access level for the member you're inviting. The portal then emails the person you invited, telling him how to sign up for the MyPalm portal and what to do to join your group. From there, he can access your group's calendar and contacts.

It's easy for group members to add events to a group's calendars. When you view or add an event to another calendar, simply edit the event on your calendar and press the Select Calendars button. From there, you'll see a popup window that lets you select all of the calendars you have, including the calendars from any groups to which you belong and can contribute to. You can insert events into the calendar of any groups for which you are either a contributor or an editor, making it easy to share your events with other calendars, such as club meetings, doctors appointments, or the like, while keeping your private information private.

This is so useful that I wonder why MyPalm doesn't let you do this with other information, such as a To Do item, contact, or even a note. In fact, I was disappointed that the MyPalm portal doesn't let you store notes on the portal at all. It would be much better if you could network all the basic information on your handheld with your fellow collaborators. Meeting minutes, notes, ideas, and to do items could all be shared seamlessly, much as you now can do with corporate enterprise systems such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange.