This latest experience in going back to Maximizer has been interesting for me. I started out with Maximizer 97is and continued on with it until version 9 or so. Back in the day I use to use a Palm Treo phone and Maxlink to sync everything, but when we moved to these newer mobile devices syncing with Maximizer seemed to get more complex. One of the things that I have noticed has changed about Maximizer over the years has been it's focus shift to larger companies and not so much the smaller ones like mine. I can't say that I blame them, after all, follow the money right?
After version 9 of Maximizer I ended up getting frustrated and moved over to Outlook, which I used for the next number of years. However, although I loved the integration that Outlook had with just about "all" mobile devices, there was some fundamental features that were missing from Outlook that I used to have in Maximizer. Quite frankly, I found things much more difficult when doing the sales for my own company as it pertained tracking prospective customers and keeping track of exactly where I was in the sales process. I ended up using Outlook in combination with Google Apps and ended up downloading apps to my iPhone like GeeTasks so that I could sync Tasks as well as appointments through the Google Apps utilities. I know have an iPhone 4 an iPad and my Dell Latitude laptop yet my life seemed more confusing than ever. In the end I decided to make my mental "Pros" and "Cons" list of using Maximizer over these other products and came to the conclusion that Maximizer offered more of what I needed than these other programs. I also considered what I was doing on my phone. I typically do not schedule appointments on the phone, even when I was using Outlook, because I like to organize and label appointments a certain way so I basically was only syncing in one direction anyway and that was from the computer to the phone. The other thing I had asked myself was, "Exactly how much information do I need on the phone anyway?" and I narrowed it down to this:
Contact Names, Addresses, Phone Numbers and Emails
Appointments
Tasks or Hotlist
I considered moving from the iPhone to a Blackberry and use MaxMobile but I didn't have a lot of information about the product. I called and emailed Maximizer sales department numerous times over 2 to 3 days, but to be frank, Maximizer's customer service is somewhat less than stellar, so when you call them....good luck!
I decided to figure out a way to do this only my own. Seeing that I already was using Outlook on my machine, I downloaded Google Calender sync for Outlook as it works great and keeps all my appointments up to date with Google Calender in the cloud. Set up is very easy to get your iPhone syncing with Google apps and syncing your Calender and Hotlist in Maximizer with Outlook is also very easy and doesn't require any additional software. I set the automatic sync for about every 10 minutes an just use Maximizer normally. When I am on the road, my iPhone calender just automatically keeps my appointments up to date, including alarms that I have set to remind me of places I have to be. If I had of purchased Google Apps Sync, I could have also synced the Hotlist, but for now I don't need to do that because I have a tendency of printing my Hotlist off the computer everyday, for other people it might be different. I found the syncing of contacts between Maximizer and Outlook somewhat clumsy as well. Therefore, the way I chose to do things is to export my contacts every few days to a CSV file and then import them into Google Contacts which automatically syncs with my phone. Not everyone will want to do this, but it works fine for me. I can understand that in a corporate environment that employees may need the full functionality provided by MaxMobile or the new product Maximizer offers like Maximizer Live, etc, but not for me. As I said, I am a small business with few employees and my needs are different and I believe it's us in the Small Business crowd that get lost. One last thing, I use Carbonite to back up all my data which is accessible to me from anywhere off nearly any computer, my phone or iPad and I mean everything, quotes, images, audio, etc.
I guess the point of this is just to say there are other solutions to get things done.
Cheers!
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