Over the last few days I’ve been experimenting a bit with remaining connected and productive whilst roaming. I’m reasonably happy with the results; I’ve been able to remain in touch with key activities and think I’ve gotten almost as much done as I would have had I been in the ground in Wellington.

I’ve jotted down some of my thoughts and findings below.

- It wasn’t possible to get away with having just one device even though I tried. I found I had to use a mix of smartphone, iPad and Macbook Pro depending on what I was doing. I talked to a few people I met here who travel extensively and they confirmed my thinking. I think the ‘one device per user’ idea just won’t work for a modern workforce.

- Email was actually my least used app overall. I used Skype for video calls, Twitter for short messaging (sms is overpriced on roaming at 80c a message), my blog to record and share event sessions/highlights in real-time and Facebook to stay in touch with family & friends. Hopefully people have been reading the blog, there will be a short quiz. Oh and of course LinkedIn to manage my professional network stuff - met a lot of new people this week.

- Roaming mobile data charges are ridiculous! I’ve had to find WiFi connectivity to minimise these costs. To their credit the symposium venue did provide reasonable WiFi during the day.

- Public WiFi is a hive of trouble from a security perspective. My security apps picked up at least a dozen bad things in public WiFi over the last few days. We need to manage our mobile endpoints to ensure they are protected.

- Purchasing a local SIM card makes sense from a 3G data perspective, and I know our team at Siemens in Germany have bought some over there, but the short stay and wide availability of WiFi meant it wasn’t worth the expense and hassle. I did a bit if quick research and overall Optus seem to offer the best deal in terms of GB/$. They throw in a bunch of local minutes and SMS which is marginally useful but not a deal maker.

- Mindset is key. Whilst over here I have been working with one of our development partners and a few key business users on building a forms processing engine which has come together in a matter of days - go agile. It would have been easy to put that in the 'too hard whilst travelling bucket’ because it did require a bit of effort. Quite a few other people I spoke to have chosen to leave things until they were back in the office, which is fair enough but then why do they need 3 or 4 mobile devices??

- Having someone to do some on the ground work back home is very important. I’ve been able to already plan out my trips and meetings for next week with a bit of help from our superstar EA.

- Batteries, especially in my smartphone, don’t last as long as I would have liked them to. I found myself charging all my gear on a nightly basis which was a moderate pain in the butt.

- Gartner’s mobile agenda app, which is have on both my phone and iPad, is fantastic. I built my agenda and then always knew where I was going next at a glance. All conferences should have an agenda app.