Synchronicity
Yesterday I spend some time delving into sync.
Personal Information Management has a history longer than Personal Computing. Over the years the number of devices that can store names numbers and notes has spiralled and evolved, leading to the need to synchronise information between these devices so as not to require data be entered multiple times.
A few years ago I was a fairly happy camper in this arena - iSync on Mac OS X Jaguar was one of the features that sold me on the platform, and did pretty much what it said on the box - simple, one-click syncing of addresses and calendar entries between my Palm PDA, SE Cellphone and OSX's own iCal and Address Book applications.
This pretty much remained the same through my purchase of a Mac Mini, OS upgrades to Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard and two new phones.
At this point, however, it all gets messy. I bought a Nokia N97 and discovered that for whatever reason neither Noika nor Apple supply an iSync driver for this phone.
The prevaling suggestion on various web fora is to use a third party service with a means of integrating with isync (such as Google), but I'm not particularly happy with the idea of handing over other people's personal information to some faceless 'cloud' service provider.
So, which way now? Is this something I can do myself?
As it turns out, yes (kinda). There are a few open-source products that can provide SyncML services, the most promising that I found being the eGroupware system, which while as it's name suggests is intended as a full blown 'groupware' solution can be tailored to more modest usage.
The first step, getting data out of my phone (which has become my main means of storing and accesing my calendar and contacts) and into eGroupwar was fairly straightforward - eGroupware itself has a simple step-by-step installation process although I did have to use the Debian packages from the 'unstable' distribution to access the most current set of features (being a php application this isn't a particularly big deal), and it was not difficult with reference to their wiki to figure out what to plug into the N97's sync dialog.
So, one bird down, now back to the Mac. For calendaring, iCal 3.x supports CalDAV, so it should have been simple enough to get this working, but sadly this was not quite the case. Apple somehow managed to forget how the internet works and their CalDAV implementation assumes that the server will provide relative URLs. eGroupware on the other hand (and it could be argued more correctly) uses relative URLs which messes up this assumption. Fortunatley this is correctable with some server-side aliasing but still a dissapointment. Additionally this support appears to be read-only.
And what about contacts? I've use Mozilla Thunderbird which has it's own contacts list, and there is a SyncML client for it in the form of Funambol's Mozilla plugin. Funambol itself is another sync server, and as it is standard compliant it is possible to make the client work with eGroupware with a small amount of tweaking on the server side.
In all I'm happy with the results, but less happy with the steps needed to get there this stuff really should 'just work', unfortunately it seems the industry is still wed to the Outlook model of using the client as a lever to sell the server (or, in the Cloud era, the service).