
Want to work like Bill Gates? As has been widely
circulated around the interweb, the world's most technologically advanced human has
walked us all through his
workflow. Unfortunately for us mortals, he's using a bunch of bloated, pricey MS-branded tools. So I took his
tools, found free alternatives, and reconfigured his workflow to be a little cheaper. There's nothing I can do about
hardware though. So if you're looking for a $100 Tablet PC, sorry folks. I couldn't find an OSS version of whiteboard
capture tools either, probably because it relies on hardware. I will admit that Bill's three screens improve
productivity. Now if I could only afford two at once... But still, his major goals are the same of most managers:
reduce paper, increase communications, and share information centrally. So let's look at these, shall we?
Email & CalendarsObviously Bill's going to use Outlook. He's fortunate enough to have
assistants filter his email. Mere mortals will have to depend of their ISP and local softwares. My recommended Outlook
replacement is
Thunderbird, for its cross-platform goodness. Want to
know how to use Thunderbird, and retrain yourself? Check out this
series on using Thunderbird, a very
thorough walk through from installation to spam filtering. To integrate calendars, you'll want to stick with the
iCalendar format, which is supported by
Sunbird, Mozilla's standalone calendar application. My
preference in calendars is
Calendar, also from Mozilla, because
it integrates with Thunderbird and Mozilla browsers. iCalendar is also supported in OS X's iCal app, so Mac users can
keep their native app if need be. If you need to sync with Palm devices, you can try using
PHP iCalendar in conjunction with this
Datebook
to iCal exporter. If anyone knows of a more elegant solution, I'm all ears. Next up: your document creation and
sharing issues solved...