The original Palm handheld computing device was conceived as a satellite to a single desktop computer. Since that time, the “computing environment” has been transformed. What was a one-to-one relationship is now a many-to-many relationship.

Within corporations, desktop PCs are almost universally networked. Many corporate users have PCs at home. The home PCs may be used by more than one Palm user. Shared data and applications such as calendaring have become popular. All these changes and more create data synchronization issues for handheld devices. Palm asked us to help develop a strategy for data synchronization in its next generation operating system. The illustration above shows a sample diagram from our recommendations.