The Council has upgraded its email system.  Before it was using IMAP with Horde, and there were complaints.  The system was slow, people used up their mailbox quota in the blink of an eye, it wasn’t very user friendly.  If you were one of the favoured few allowed access to your email from home, you had to use a big RSA SecurID keyfob with an ever-changing 6 digit number on the front.  I’m not entirely sure what was in council email that could possibly need as much protection as internet banking!

Now that has changed, and they’re embarking on a rollout of Outlook Web Access, which I think is the same thing as MS Exchange.

And it’s pretty good.  Access from home is much better.  It has many new features, lots of which are ace.  It should help the officers and councillors be more productive, as it is simply easier to use, despite being more fully functional.  It’s more the sort of product other organisations use, so people joining us and leaving us will have useful transferable skills.

And like other Outlook versions, it also has a good group diary facility, meaning we can store our commitments and availability on the system, and it can help organise meetings by checking other people’s schedules for you.  This could really be helpful right across the council, where there is no shortage of busy people, and particularly helpful with councillors who have strange commitment patterns.

So, I was hoping it would integrate with the electronic diary I am already using on my Nokia E65, which for the past few years has been reasonably successful at managing my diverse commitments and making sure I turn up at most of the things I am supposed to do.

I was really hoping I could just make the Council system a third or fourth place where I can sync my data to.  If I did that reasonably frequently, the version of my diary on the Council system should be up-to-date enough to be useful, and could work as an extra backup just in case.  True it would mean sending details of my personal commitments too, but you can mark them as private, and it is useful to the Council because it explains when I am on other business and not available.

Technically, I think this is possible. There is a free download which connects Nokia business phones with the Outlook system.  Unfortunately, there is a policy in place which says this is a bad idea.  They don’t want personal devices connecting directly to the council system.

This is a little odd.  I am allowed to read my email and connect to my diary from any computer in the world.  That’s at least partly the point of the new system – easy, secure, remote access.  I can even use the web browser on my mobile phone to access the system, although the screen is a bit small for that to be really useful.  But it seems actually synching with the system is different, and not allowed.

The solutions suggested have been helpful, but stop short of what I want.  “Keep two diaries!” they suggest.  Which strikes me as a recipe for real confusion, not least because being a councillor is more a lifestyle than a job.  Council commitments can be any time from 7am-10pm six nights a week.

They have also offered me a Council mobile phone with data connection that would do everything my existing phone does.  On a one off basis, they don’t mind taking my existing data from my existing phone, putting it on the council system and from then on, only using a Council phone.

Now, there’s problems with this approach.  Nottingham City Councillors are offered a fair amount of kit if they want it to help with the job of being a councillor.  You can have a council telephone extension in your home, which I do have.  They offer mobile phones, a laptop or a computer.  I’ve resisted all of those because I already have one of each, and I don’t want another.  I don’t want two computers on my desk where one can only be used for council work and one for private, not least because the boundary between the two can be blurry.  This weekend, a Council director kindly came to a Lib Dem meeting to brief Lib Dem local party members about regeneration in Nottingham. Was that encouraged Council work or verboten party political work – or really a blend of the two?

So I have resisted taking on Council tech, because in almost all circumstances, I can use my own equipment to do the same job, and not have to worry about whether I am abusing council facilities when I also use it to do all the things I normally do with the internet, which if I’m honest consumes almost all of my leisure time.

The point at which this approach doesn’t work is when the Council ban personal machines from connecting to their network.  Which is an understandable position – their own machines they are responsible for keeping secure, virus free, and legal in terms of software licences. Other people’s machines are a different kettle of fish – close to Rumsfeld Unknown Unknowns.

But where that leaves me with my diary is uncertain. Hopefully this will be resolvable.