The solution that I recommended for him was Intellisync from Pumatech. The reason is that it's very easy to set up and is very customizable as well. One of the greatest strengths of Intellisync is that you can use it to synchronize your handheld with not only Lotus Notes, but also with Microsoft Outlook, Palm Desktop, and more. In fact, you can choose which information (i.e., Address Look, Calendar, etc.) gets synchronized with which program. This means you can synchronize your mail with Lotus Notes, your calendar with Microsoft Outlook, and your addresses with Palm Desktop, whatever works best for you.

One of my favorite features of Intellisync is the ability to confirm what changes will be made to your handheld or Lotus Notes. For instance, if you accidentally or purposely delete 100 contact records on your handheld, you'll see a message the next time you synchronize asking if you're sure you want to delete these records in Notes as well. This feature is extremely helpful for someone like me who often switches conduits and makes large-scale changes.

One drawback to Intellisync is that there's a separate version for Palm OS and Pocket PC devices. This means that if you switch between the two brands of handhelds, like I recently did, you'll have to buy another version of the software.

When I originally wrote a tip about Intellisync back in January 2002, I was using a trial version of the software and was very happy with it. In fact, I had gone for a while without synchronizing my Lotus Notes information with my Sony CLIE, and Intellisync got me back on track. It really helped me during Lotusphere this year to travel light (no backpack) and keep all my notes on the conference in order. But I'm not using it today since I've switched to a server-based synchronization that I'll talk more about next month.

Pylon Conduit and Pylon Pro from AvantGo
AvantGo offers two synchronization solutions, Pylon Conduit and Pylon Pro. They can be found at http://avantgo.com/products/businesses/workforce/productivity/pylon/. A free 30-day trial is available at http://domino.avantgo.com/evaluate. The price is $69.95 for Pylon Conduit and $169.95 for Pylon Pro (more with the subscription option).

Pylon Conduit offers the following advantages over the standard synchronization provided by Intellisync and EasySync Pro:

• You can synchronize multiple address books and calendars to a single handheld;

• You can synchronize discussion databases based on the discussion.ntf template to a category in your Memo Pad application;

• You can synchronize the text of Word attachments to your Palm handheld.

If you need even more than the features outlined above, then Pylon Pro might be right for you. It has everything Pylon Conduit has plus the following:

• You can synchronize data from up to 20 custom databases without programming by selecting a view and form;

• You can take advantage of @DbLookup capability when filling out forms remotely, provided you replicate the lookup database and view as well.