For some time I had been looking for a way to synchronise my email, contacts and calendar between all my devices, which at present include my work Windows 7 PC, my home MacBook Air, my iPhone 4 and iPad 2. Even though the are many different approaches to accomplishing this, for one reason or another I dismissed them until I arrived at the approach that I outline in the following procedure.

Firstly I suppose I should outline my current setup, if you have a similar configuration to me then perhaps this procedure can be of benefit to you also.

Firstly I have my own domain name (@firthwebworks.com.au) so whatever procedure I used would need to be able to work well using my own domain name rather than using a generic gmail or hotmail email account. Even though the solution I am about to propose does in fact use a gmail account, from the end users perspective, that is from those who receive my emails, they are receiving them from my domain name (@firthwebworks.com.au) rather than a gmail account (@gmail.com).

Secondly, I wanted to be able to sync between ALL my devices and because I have the Windows 7 box thrown in there, I dismissed using Apples iCloud services for synching. Now I’m sure there will be someone who will tell me that you can still use iCloud to synch Windows devices as well and that may or may not be the case, I am just offering a solution that works well, at least with me.

I use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client as this has the required extensions available to facilitate the synchronisation procedure.

These are the main steps required to setup for synching, we will go into each in much greater detail in separate postings later.

1. Create a gmail email account and setup the “send mail as” feature to your domain email address. Create your google calendar. Forward all your email to your newly created gmail account. I will demonstrate the procedure to do this if you use a hosting company that uses cPanel for configuring your email.
2. Setup Thunderbird to allow synchronisation of your email, contacts and calendar. This procedure will require the use of three additional extensions, “Google Contacts”, “Lightening” and “Provider for Google Calendar”. This procedure is good for both my Windows 7 work box and my home MacBook Air notebook.
3. Setup your iPhone & iPad to synchronise with your email, contacts and calendar.

I have divided this procedure into a 4 part procedure, you are reading Part 1.

Lookout for Part 2 – Creating and Configuring Your Gmail Account.

We discussed at length the requirements of this new application and decided it would need to be as simple as possible, so basically we narrowed it down into a two step process.

Client Appointment Request

It had to be easy for the client to make an appointment. The client simply has to browse the “available” appointment time slots (displayed in green on the calendar) and then click on the time they would like to make their appointment. Next they would be sent to the log on screen to log on to their account with Living Wisdom (or create an account if they didn’t have one). They would then be taken to the Client Appointment Request screen where all they needed to do is select the type of contact, be it face to face, phone or Skype and then click the confirm button. As soon as this is done an email is sent to Living Wisdom for their review.

Living Wisdom Appointment Confirmation

Living Wisdom Counselling & Seminars after receipt of the email from the client would then log on to their admin area and then either confirm the appointment in which case a confirmation email would be automatically sent to the client or contact the client to reschedule, if for some reason the time didn’t suit. The times when rescheduling would be necessary would be few and far between as Living Wisdom has the ability to mark time slots as “Not available” if they have some reason why they wont be available at that time.

48 hours prior to the appointment falling due, a reminder email would be automatically sent to the client informing them of their upcoming appointment.

Automatic Calendar Appointment Generation

The available time slots in the calendar are generated on the first day of each month, three months in advance. The default number of time slots can be edited in the admin area. Times can be added, deleted or edited. These will only come into effect when the next months time slots are generated.

Marking “Blocks” as “Not Available”

Living Wisdom also requested a way to mark blocks of dates as “not available” for times when they were on vacation or conducting seminars interstate or overseas. This is accomplished in the admin area by selecting a start date and an end date and then selecting either “Available” or “Not Available” from the drop down list. When this form is submitted all time slots that fall between the dates selected will be changed.

Conclusion

This Appointment Calendar application has many uses that will save both time and money for a wide variety of businesses like Doctors, Dentists, Counsellers, Bed & Breakfast, Motels even motor mechanics can benefit from the reduced administration time wasting, time that can be spent on more productive endeavors.

If you would like to explore the possibilities a little more, please drop me a line on our Contact Us page.

Anyway, please feel free to have a look around and let me know what you think. I’m always looking at ways to improve any aspect of my website.

Enjoy,

Lee Firth
Owner
Firth Web Works