The midden

Been getting ready for my workshop at the UCISA User Support Conference tomorrow and thinking about what has changed in the last 12 months that is likely to have a significant impact on how we work and play. I think that one of the most exciting changes will be the appearance of MobileMe from Apple, as announced by Steve Jobs at the WWDC a couple of weeks ago.

Mobileme stores all your email, contacts and calendars on a secure server or cloud. When one of these changes on one of your machines, it automatically changes them on all the other ones you have connected to your cloud. So, for example, when you receive an email, mobileme automatically sends it from your cloud to all your devices. Similarly, if you add a new contact to your laptop address book, it will automatically appear in the address book of your other devices.

While mobileme is designed primarily to operate with the new iPhone 3G and Macs, it will also work with PCs. So if you only use a PC or if you use a mix of Macs and PCs, you can still synch your email, calendars and contacts automatically.

Mobileme also allows you to access and share files using iDisk, Apple’s online file storage that .Mac users will be familiar with. Files can be saved to iDisk, and accessed from any of your devices wherever you are. Files can also be shared by sending a link to the file to whoever you want to share it with. PC users can also use this by mounting their iDisk as a network drive and access it from Windows Explorer

So mobile me is significant in 3 ways. Firstly, it means that all your data is always up-to-date on all your devices wherever you are. No more having to wait to get back to the office to put your phone in the cradle to synch it with your laptop. Secondly. all you data is accessible from all your devices. If you created a presentation at work and left it on that machine, you can now access it from home or wherever you are. Thirdly, it brings PC users on board so its not just a “Mac thing”.

I think that mobileme is going to significantly change how we do things and finally brings real mobility to the way we work.