I’m trying to get things back online and organized on my laptop for working with clients. One of the things I used to do is have many of the frequently used files for clients set to be available offline when I’m disconnected from our network.

The problem was that I quickly ran out of available free space on my hard drive to maintain all the files I may need along with those programs and options that are run locally from the machine all the time.

Here’s my question, can I easily redirect and RELY on moving my default offline files location to my portable, Western Digital 250GB USB drive?

Obviously this is my work machine and it needs to be reliable and no major unexpected issues arise when I’m not expecting them.

MySpace isn’t quite the best comparison for a new service launched by Microsoft called Aggreg8. It’s a social/professional networking site that’s dedicated more to the IT pros and their working relationships and partners.

Aggreg8 is a social networking and collaboration space for the IT community. Inside you can keep track of your trusted network, find others through your network with similar interests or situations. Then you can collaborate with anyone in the community inside our working groups. We even allow you to create your own working groups, choosing if you want to collaborate with the whole community or collaborate in private working groups. All the expected tools are there for collaboration, allowing you to create postings, post files, share events. And you can tag, rate reply to any posting. Of course Aggreg8 can come to you as all the working groups come with an RSS feed. So come on in and build your influence in IT! To the MVP’s we offer a warm welcome for helping us to build the best community possible.

I’ve heard about this from a friend of mine as it was highlighted on his blog and another tech blog. Those two places are where I picked up the MySpace comparison.

Aggreg8 has a collection of “Featured Working Groups”:

• SAN System Project
• Architecture
• IT Management
• Office 2007
• SQL Server
• Office Dev
• ISA Server
• CEM Reengineering
• Exchange Server

I’m most interested in Office 2007 of course, SQL Server, Office Dev, ISA Server, and Exchange Server.

I’ve built out my profile and browsed around the site so we’ll see what comes of it and how beneficial it is to me in my full-time job and other endeavors.

It looks like this is really new and hasn’t gotten much press yet, so I along with my friend are wondering if this is more like an Alpha release or something:

A contact of mine Pete Cashmore actually was debating with some other professionals, whether or not Aggreg8 was intended for a public release just yet, or whether it wasn’t meant to be launched right now. Who knows.

If anyone else has signed up and is a member of Aggreg8, be sure and let me know and we can expand our networks.