Mobile Me ... or Me and My iPhone "In the Cloud "

  I see discussions all the time by real estate professionals as to which phone to buy.  It's a tough question to answer.  Treo, Blackberry, iPhone ... probably the 3 major phone choices mentioned the most.  There are others of course, but these three are mentioned the most.  There are more and more copy-cats coming out, so I'm sure there may come a time when that perfect Realtor^® phone shows up.

  I personally have two phones, a Treo 650 and a 1st Generation iPhone.  Both are older technology, the iPhone newer than the Treo, but they both work perfectly and they each have their own pluses, and minuses.  For this article I'm going to focus on the iPhone.  BTW, I also have the latest phone software installed on my iPhone which is an improvement over the old, 1st Generation software.

  I got the iPhone as soon as it was available (people were standing in line to get one) so I could make sure that our software was compatible and would sync properly.  It worked perfectly the 1st time, so no worries.  After that I spent a lot of time playing with it.  The fact that it has Wi-Fi built in makes it simple, and cheap, to surf the internet, check email, etc. all that without any phone charges when using Wi-Fi, and the large screen isn't a bad thing either.  But, it's still just a phone tool and the fact that it would sync with Outlook/RealeSeller made it nice to carry around.  The only real negatives I see about the iPhone technology is the lack of an infrared port, so no SUPRA keybox support, and no simple way to expand the storage capacity, like SD card support.  A small but significant error in design judgment on Apple's part, in my opinion.  If the iPhone had an infrared port, and SD card support, it might well be the nearest to perfect all around phone tool for a real estate agent.  But, I think that with all of its other features it's ahead of the majority of PDA style phones.

  Well, today a client wanted to know if RealeSeller worked with MobileMe, which is what started all of this.  Well, I really had not taken the time to find out, even though I have an iPhone, and I told him that.  But, I also said that since it would sync with Outlook, I pretty much assumed that it would work.  After I got off the phone, I decided to take the time and fully investigate the MobileMe service.

  So, what exactly is MobileMe?  Well it is a fairly new service that Apple is offering that will allow you to be fully mobile and keep up with just about every aspect of your on-the-go job.  You can read your email, access your contacts, and see your calendar from anywhere.  As long as you have at least a Wi-Fi or a Phone connection, your data will stay synchronized automatically with your iPhone once you set it up.  Your Gallery Photo's and files stored on your iDisk can be in sync also. 

  To set up the MobileMe service, you have to download and install the iTunes software and a special MobileMe synching software that will connect and interface with Outlook.  So far I've only tested it with Outlook 2003 but I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't work with Outlook 2007.  You can access the MobileMe Setup site and after installing the MobileMe software, you can decide what to sync.  Contacts, Calendars, and your Bookmarks.  I'm currently just syncing my Contacts and Calendars.  BTW, the setup site covers both the Mac and PC setup's. 

  I'd like to point out one down side here to the MobileMe service.  It doesn't sync your Outlook tasks which means that if you don't create a corresponding calendar item when you create a task in Outlook, you won't know about it on your iPhone.  Now I create a lot of tasks, mainly because you can "Complete" them, or show a percentage of progress on the task, or assign a task to someone else, etc.  But, it's a simple matter to create a calendar item without a reminder so it will show up using this service.  Something as simple as going to your tasks folder in Outlook and dragging a task to the calendar and dropping it on the associated date (it won't do the correct date automatically) doesn't take that much effort.  But, just be aware of this limitation.

  You have several choices of when a sync will occur in your MobileMe preferences.  Automatically, Every Hour, Every Day, Every Week, or Manually.  I have my set to Every Hour.  Automatically pretty much means every time you update something which might become a little irritating at times, but that's a personal choice.

  When you sign up for the service, you can try it out for 60 days FREE just to make sure it will work for you.  I think 2 months is very generous myself.  After the trial period it is only $99 a year.  Not a bad price really, about $8.25 a month which makes it affordable to just about anyone.  You also get an email address, yourname@me.com.  Since MobileMe email is an IMAP account, you will have to add it as one of your email accounts in Outlook.  Once you do that, you can set up a rule in Outlook to make a copy of all incoming email and put it in your IMAP inbox.  This will force the software to sync your incoming email to the website and your iPhone.  While I was experimenting with this setup, it only took a minute to push 144 emails to my iPhone using this method.

  While MobileMe might not be the perfect answer for your situation, it might fit many of you who have an iPhone and use Outlook for your customer relationship management solution.  Since it is free to try, you have nothing to lose by trying it out.  If you don't like it, delete the IMAP mailbox, the Outlook rule, and cancel your MobileMe account.  It's that simple.

  Only one of the many cool things that our software, RealeSeller, can do that others can't, is allow you to push not just contacts to your phones, but properties, with an image if the phone is capable of displaying one.  The above image is a snapshot of several properties I pushed to my MobileMe site, which then pushed them to my iPhone.  All of this without a special piece of software being installed on the phone!  The iPhone has almost the exact same view as the MobileMe web site... very little difference.  Any phone using Windows Mobile, or the Palm Os, can work exactly the same way using our Outlook real estate add-in.

 I did do something that was unintentional that turned out to be really cool. I had 4 contact folders in Outlook as sub folders of my default contact folder. They all had different names, addresses, phone numbers, etc. in them. So what did the MobileMe software do? It added all the sub folders as separate folders on my MobileMe web site. Wow! That allows you to have several types of contact folders that will sync to your site. It also adds them as new Groups in the iPhone so you can have many different sets of folder types as long as you set them as a sub-folder of the default Outlook contact folder. An awesome feature!  I think I'll start putting my homes data as a sub folder of my contact folder as long as I'm using this service.  Now all listings can be in a separate group on my iPhone!

  I think you'll like this service if you give it a try.  It is simple and easy to set up.  If you do decide to try it out, or you are currently using it, let us know what you think about it.  I'd love to hear from you.

 Larry Perry
 RealeSeller™ Transforms Outlook Into a "Genuine Real Estate CRM Application"
 Our Online RealeSeller training classes are FREE!
 Phone: (972) 514-3218
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