Here is an article from todays Wall Street Journal on front page of marketplace section by Mossburg. E-mailed Brad Rowe at Puma and he advised that the synchronization technology used to connect notebook PIMs to Visto server for synchronization purposes is Puma's IntelliSync product. They have been working with Visto for over a year.
ONE OF THE WORST hassles for computer users is keeping copies of all the
up-to-date files they need on multiple personal computers.
If you have an office PC, a home PC and a laptop for traveling, it can
be a tremendous pain to make sure each PC contains current copies of
your electronic calendar and contact list, your e-mail and any documents
you're working on.
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Walter S. Mossberg answers selected computer and technology questions
from readers in Mossberg's Mailbox. If you have a question you want
answered, or any other comment or suggestion about his column, please
e-mail Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.
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Many people try to keep everything coordinated by copying key files from
the office onto floppy disks and later recopying them onto a home PC or
laptop. But floppies are easy to forget or lose, their capacity is too
limited to handle many large files, and you can too easily replace a
newer file with an older one by mistake.
Some folks try to get around the problem by using a single laptop and
toting it between locations. But that means you are always lugging a lot
of weight. Worse, if you lose the laptop, or it breaks, you're done for.
Now, a little company called Visto Corp., in Mountain View, Calif., has
come up with an ingenious solution to this problem. It's an inexpensive
service that creates a secure, encrypted, electronic "briefcase" for you
on the Web which you can reach from any Windows 95 or Windows NT
computer with Internet access, using one of the two leading Web
browsers, Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. Because the
briefcase resides on the Internet, and not on a single PC, any files or
data you place into it are available for use from any of your PCs, or
even a borrowed machine in somebody else's home or office, as long as
you enter the right ID and password. What's more, Visto comes with a
free software program that keeps everything synchronized.
Here is how it works. First, you go to Visto's Web site (www.visto.com)
and sign up for a briefcase account. The accounts are free for 30 days,
then cost $9.95 a month or $100 a year for as much as 20 megabytes of
briefcase storage. You then download the synchronizing software, called
Visto Assistant, or request that Visto send it to you on a free CD.
ONCE YOU INSTALL the Assistant on each of your PCs, it places a special
Visto folder on each computer's desktop. The Assistant will upload to
your on-line briefcase any files you put in that folder, replacing any
older copies. In addition, the Assistant will automatically extract and
upload to your briefcase contact data from popular address-book
software, such as Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Organizer and Starfish's
Sidekick.
It will also upload bookmarks from your Web browser, and your waiting
e-mail. When you log onto your briefcase from any PC, you find all your
contacts, e-mail and bookmarks ready to use right within the Web
browser. And you can download any files from the briefcase to any other
computer.
If you make changes using one PC, the Assistant will first update the
files in the briefcase, and then later, it will synchronize the files on
the other PCs. For instance, you could upload a partially completed
report from your office PC, download it at home, finish it and run the
Assistant to update the older copy in the on-line briefcase. The next
morning, at the office, the Assistant on your office PC would log into
your briefcase and automatically download the completed report. You
could also add a new contact to your electronic briefcase while on the
road with a laptop, and the Assistant would later add it to the address
books on your home and office PCs.
Visto says it ensures the security of all this data by scrambling it so
it's unreadable by anyone -- even Visto employees -- without your ID and
password. Whenever you send your ID and password, they, too, are
encrypted, so they can't be easily stolen. The system never allows you
to tap directly into any of your other PCs. You only can access the
on-line briefcase, which acts as a sort of arms-length, independent
middleman.
I TESTED VISTO using three machines: an office desktop connected to a
network; a home PC; and a new laptop that contained none of my personal
data and thus was a surrogate for a borrowed machine. The briefcase
worked fine every time, replicating my contact data, e-mail, bookmarks
and selected files on all three machines.
Even on the new laptop, I was able to use my contact list and bookmarks
on-line. But there are some drawbacks. The biggest is the lack of a
calendar feature. Visto plans to add this in a new release coming soon,
and I tried out a prototype, which looked good.
Also, uploads and downloads are slow. On the laptop, using a common 28.8
modem, it took about half an hour to transfer seven megabytes of files
from the briefcase. Finally, you have to plan carefully or the whole
system won't work. You either have to upload manually any files you
think you'll need on another PC, or keep the Assistant running
constantly to do the uploads and updating on a schedule you set.
If you forget to place a needed file in the Visto folder, it won't get
automatically uploaded to the Web briefcase and thus won't be available
to you on another PC. But Visto's briefcase is still a big step forward
for the person with multiple PCs. You don't have to be a computer whiz
to use it, and it's always waiting for you on the Web, with the
important data you need, available from whatever PC you have at hand.
It's a great use of the Internet. |
