If you are like me it may be some time since you saw your (whole) desktop. That is the top of your desk rather than your personal computer. It always seems to get buried beneath notebooks, Post-it notes, receipts, business cards and the like. In theory, the “groupware” applications and personal information management (PIM) software on my office, home and portable PCs should make organising my business, personal and family lives straightforward.

Well, it does not. For a start, the Lotus Notes software on my office machine is possibly the least collaborative piece of collaboration software developed. Virtually no other software works with it. More annoyingly, I have yet to find an easy way to synchronise the contacts, diary entries and notes on my office PC with the PIM data stored on my other machines.