• OK, how does this thing work?
• Can I use Accomplice off-line?
• Can I share my Accomplice with people not using Accomplice?
• How do I synch Accomplice with my PDA or Smart Phone?
• Where does Accomplice store my information?
• How should I use the “On My Plate” features?
• What are the minimum system requirements to run Accomplice?
• Does Accomplice require Microsoft Outlook?

Accomplice is an application you download and install on your computer or on a U3 Smart USB flash drive. All your data – your activities, your notes, etc. – is stored right on your hard drive or U3 Smart drive, not somewhere on the internet. You can use Accomplice when you’re not connected to the internet as well as when you are. If you’ve got your Accomplice set to use your email or calendar software, e.g. Microsoft Outlook, then Accomplice talks to your email and calendar software right on the computer where you’re running Accomplice, to show you your emails and your appointments and interact with them. Accomplice only talks to that software on your computer; it does not go out to the network to retrieve those emails or appointments – it’s up to your email/calendar software to do that.

The Accomplice software also connects, when you’re online, to the Accomplice service on the internet. You setup that connection when you register Accomplice. The Accomplice service can then notify you of important updates, help diagnose and resolve any issues, and most importantly allow you to share activities and notes with other people. If those people are not yet Accomplice users, they’ll get invited automatically by email, and anything you’ve shared with them will be waiting for them. When you share activities and notes with other users, information about those activities and notes (and the entire team on those activities) is sent by your Accomplice software to the Accomplice service when you’re online. And when the other users are online, the Accomplice service delivers the information to them. In this way, you and the others you work with don’t have to be online at the same time, and your data – and theirs – stays on your respective hard drives (or U3 Smart drives).  You can use your Accomplice to stay on top of all of your activities and notes, whether shared or not, and the Accomplice service will take care to keep your shared information in sync with your team(s).

Please note that because your Accomplice information is kept on your own hard drive or U3 Smart drive, and not on the internet, you should not install it for your own use on multiple computers. Each Accomplice installation keeps its own data, so to get the same data on multiple computers you’d need to somehow share with yourself or manually copy data back and forth: the result will inevitably be confusion or other complications. To use Accomplice on multiple computers, we highly recommend installing it on a U3 Smart drive. Of course, if multiple people have separate logins on the same computer, they can each use the same Accomplice installation, because Accomplice will keep their data separate.

Accomplice can synchronize to the standard Tasks utility program available on virtually any mainstream smart phone or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), including Blackberry, Treo, Windows Mobile, and most Symbian smart phones.  Syncing is bidirectional, so changes you make on your mobile device show up in Accomplice on your computer, and vice versa.

In the currently released versions of Accomplice, this synchronization requires Microsoft Outlook.  This is because Accomplice syncs through the Outlook Tasks utility, and then to the Tasks program on your PDA.  Here’s how to do that…

1) First sync your Accomplice application with Outlook Tasks by clicking these menu options in Accomplice:  File >> Import/Export >> Sync Activities with Outlook Tasks.

2) Second, sync Outlook Tasks with your PDA or smart phone through whatever sync mechanism you normally use, e.g. a USB cable, wirelessly, etc.  Note that to get changes from your PDA back to Accomplice, you’ll need to do one more sync between Outlook and Accomplice, as in step 1.

Here’s one other recommendation: Show just what’s “On My Plate”. 
Your PDA may display all of your tasks by default, and this can be overwhelming.  So to clear through the clutter of all your tasks, try filtering the tasks to show only the ones that have a category of “On My Plate”, i.e. the ones that you want to focus on today.  (For any activity flagged in Accomplice as “On My Plate”, Accomplice sets its category in Outlook Tasks to “On My Plate”. This category setting propagates when you sync to your PDA, thus allowing you to view “On My Plate” as a category.)

The sync process is also smart. Accomplice syncs data bi-directionally between your Accomplice Activities and Outlook Tasks, and on to your PDA or smart phone. This means that new Tasks will be created in Outlook for Activities that were originally created in the Accomplice application, and vice versa.  And after an Outlook Task and an Accomplice Activity have first been synced, changes to it in one system update to the other system.  If there are any conflicts, Accomplice does “the right thing”.

Accomplice stores your Accomplice data directly on your own computer (or for U3 users, on your U3 Smart USB drive).  Activities and notes that you choose to share with other Accomplice users are stored both inside your Accomplice profile on your computer, and in the Accomplice profiles on the computers of those people whom you share with.  Only the things you choose to share with others go to their respective computers, ie. things you don’t share are private and stay on your own computer.

Your Accomplice data on your computer is stored in the default location that Windows provides for application data. Your content includes Accomplice Activities, Notes, preferences, configuration settings, custom filters you create, and automatic backups of your profile database.  Here is how to get to the directory where your Accomplice profile data is stored.
- If Accomplice is installed on your Windows PC, then from your Windows Start menu, select "Run...", then type "%appdata%" (without quotes) in the Open dialogue box, then click <OK>. (%appdata% is just an alias for where Windows apps store their data files.) Click to go down to the Accomplice\Default\ subdirectory.
- If Accomplice is installed on your U3 Smart USB flash drive, insert your U3 Smart drive into your PC and open the U3 launchpad. Click the "Explore U3 drive" option in the launchpad. This will open Windows Explorer, where you should see several folders.  Double click on the folder named "Documents", then "Accomplice", then "Default".

Below the “default” directory are “data”, “backup”, “log” and possibly other directories.  The “data” directory is where your Accomplice profile database is stored. This contains your Accomplice data such as your Activities, Notes, and custom settings. The “backup” directory is the default location where backups of your profile database are saved.  The “log” directory is where Accomplice keeps a technical log of errors and technical events that might be useful if you encounter an issue requiring technical support from Accomplice.

At this time, Accomplice does not support storing your active Accomplice profile in a directory other than the default location.  However, Accomplice does let you choose a different location for its automatic backups of your Accomplice profile.  See Tools > Preferences > Automatic Actions, and choose a custom location for Accomplice to make automatic backups.  If you use a U3 Smart drive, we strongly recommend you create a a custom backup location to an actual computer, in case you ever lose your USB drive.

Just like there’s only so much you can put on your dinner plate, there’s only so much you can realistically work on in a given day.  You can use the “On My Plate” features to help you focus on just those things you want to work on today.  Click to activate the “On My Plate” icon  to the left of each activity that you want to focus on today.  Then you can click the  Activity List filter, and Accomplice will show you only the things you have on your plate.  With successive clicks, you can toggle any activity from “On My Plate” ;  to snoozed to come on your plate tomorrow;  and to “off your plate”  .  Or you can double-click the On My Plate icon to pull up a calendar so you can snooze your activity to come up on your plate on a specific date. 

One of these Windows operating systems is required: Vista, Windows XP (Home or Professional), Windows 2000, Windows NT, or Windows XP.    We strongly recommend that your computer has at least 512 Megabytes of RAM.
 
You also must have Microsoft's .NET (pronounced "dot net") framework version 1.1 installed on your computer. This .NET framework is typically already installed on most Windows computers.  Even if you have .NET 2.0 installed, you still need to have .NET 1.1 installed to run Accomplice.  If Accomplice runs OK on your computer, you have .NET 1.1 framework. If you are not sure, click here .

In order to share activities to and from others, you must also have an Internet connection, at least intermittently. Otherwise you may use the software in an offline mode.

What about running on a Mac or Linux?