Serendipity

Sometimes you just get lucky, I guess. Case in point: I've been invited to write an article for Business Week. This is utterly relevant to what I am doing right now, and yet is completely random. One of my friends at work (Erik Olson, @EAEO) twittered that he recommended following @johnabyrne, Editor-in-Chief of BusinessWeek. I did so. Turns out I was John's 2,500th Twitter follower, and as a result, he offered to let me write the article as a reward.

It's such an amazing coincidence. My project (Best Buy Remix, http://remix.bestbuy.com) is gathering momentum inside Best Buy and we are working on getting out the word externally. We just brought on a community manager to help us reach out to external development communities and take care of the folks using our portal. We've been talking to PR and Marketing about how to reach out. And then this opportunity drops into my lap.

Sometimes you just get lucky, indeed.

- Kevin

Getting Outlook calendar onto your iPhone without violating corporate policies

At work (Best Buy), we don't allow non-company-owned devices on the network. This means that I can't sync my (personal) iPhone with my work calendar. Since my work-provided phone is dead as a doornail right now, this is kind of a problem. But I'm a resourceful guy, and I'm pretty good with the Google. 

So I found a way to do it, mostly courtesy of this post from Ian Fernando. Basically, you need to do 4 things:

1. Use Google Calendar Sync to get your Outlook calendar into Google Calendar
2. Sign up for a (free) account with www.nuevasync.com (beta service, will probably go pay or go away some day, but for now it works and is free)
3. Give Nuevasync access to your Google calendar (not your account, and not your password, just access to the calendar)
4. Add a calendar sync on the iPhone to the MS Exchange server that Nuevasync provides (detailed directions at Nuevasync site)
   

It's a pretty simple process, and the results are hard to argue with: I have my calendar on my phone.