Macworld recently had a post called “The Portable Office: Work Anywhere” and it got me to thinking. What tools am I using myself so I can “work anywhere”? Here are those tools I use almost daily whether I am working in Home Office Warrior headquarters or from somewhere else.

Anywhere Hardware

First of all, there is the hardware I use in my “work anywhere” office. The main piece of hardware I use is of course Macbook The reason I use the Mac computer can be summed up in three words, “it just works”. There is nothing I need to do which I can’t do on the Mac. And once you see many of the applications I use, you will soon realize that I don’t need a pc to do any of them.

The second piece of hardware that I started to use right at a year ago is the iPhone Once again, this is one of those tools I would not be without. The features of the iPhone are ideal for someone who works on the web and needs to do so from anywhere. I will be the first one to admit that AT&T and I don’t always get along. But, what I have come to appreciate is, I really don’t get along with any cell phone carrier. They all have their good points and bad. The iPhone has so many good things going for it, I can overlook my issues with AT&T. (As a side note, I will do a post soon on the applications I feel are must have for the iPhone.)

One other piece of hardware I feel is important, and mainly for those times when I am traveling and working from a hotel room is the AirPort Express Base Station I mainly use it to expand a wireless connection which might be available in the hotel as I find most of them rather weak.

Anywhere Applications

If there was one applications I would not be without, it would be Gmail There are a number of reasons for this choice, even with Apple’s Mail being available.

• I get a huge amount of email every single day and being able to create labels and filters with Gmail is wonderful. It really makes organizing the incoming mail easy and efficient.
• I publish more than one of my email addresses on the web. Because of this, I really appreciate the built in spam filter Gmail supplies. And I only occasionally get an email that slips through and ends up in the spam folder.
• Gmail offers custom domain addresses and we use one with our G2 Web Media domain. I also have a special email address for this blog.
• Now that Gmail supports IMAP, I can check my email from any computer that has Internet access. And the iPhone supports Gmail too.

Because those of us here at G2 Web Media aren’t sharing a network calendar per se, we needed some way to share a master calendar and Google Calendar is really our best option for this. Yes we could use Apple iCal and we may eventually move to it once they get the bugs our of Mobile Me. But for now we will stick with Google calendar. With Gcal, I set up multiple calendars, including “G2 Web Media”, “Editorial Calendar”, and “Home”. And like Gmail, I can access my Gcal via my iPhone since I use Spanning Sync to sync my Gcal with iCal and when I sync my iPhone, it is all in sync. I will say this, Mobile Me has been working very good lately and is keeping my iPhone up to date on my calendar without having to sync.

A fairly new application I have come to really appreciate a lot is Evernote With Evernote, I can use it on my MacBook, my iPhone and access it from either. If you have not used it, you really must. What I have found most amazing, just when I think I have figured it out, I find something else I can do with it. And having it on the iPhone has expanding its use even more.

Communicating between all of us involved in the day to day workings of G2 Web Media and even clients is done by using a couple applications, both of which are available from the web. First of all, we use instant messaging all day long and the application we use the most is Adium The other one we use a lot is Skype With Skype, if I am in a hotel room or a shared office space which has wifi, I can make calls with my MacBook. It has become my phone from anywhere.

Anywhere Tools we Need

One are we have been struggling with in finding just the right fit has been project collaboration and a good CRM. One we have been kicking around is BatchBook. I just can’t decide as there are so many to chose from. For project collaborative, the grand-daddy of them all is Basecamp. Again, just don’t know if it is the right fit for us. Where we have been struggle is we can not define what we want these applications to do for us and how we can work with them. We also want applications we can use both on our Macs and our iPhones. We aren’t asking for too much are we?

If anyone would like to leave a comment on what they are using in these two areas, I would greatly appreciate it. Any help you can give would be great.