Collaboration Data... chaos!

Maintaining my personal data has always been a challenge to me, as organized as I might be, according to some people. Working in different environments also implies that there is a need for a central storage of data, accessible to any environment and without that environment being predefined. How can I achieve that? This is a question that has kept me busy many times in the past. Every day I am confronted with some kind of a hole in my collaboration data... wrong contact info, missing contacts, etc, etc.

Keeping my documents and development in sync is something I succeeded to do pretty much from the beginning when the problem arose. I keep my files in sync between my laptop and my PC at home with the help of some tools that use the concept of "workspaces". On the other hand, as stated above, synchronizing my collaboration data (aka Contacts, Appointments, etc, etc) remains still a challenge. That challenge became even bigger when I started doing projects for a client of mine that makes use of the Lotus Notes application as their collaboration platform... I am lost... contacts in Lotus Notes, contacts in MS Outlook on my laptop, contacts in MS Outlook on my PC, contacts on my mobile phone...  everywhere I turn I have a different set of contacts! Imagine the chaos in my calendar!

I decided to confront the issue. I will start building a tool to synchronize some collaboration data between the two platforms and I will make the code available when it is ready.