[coolpoete]

OTA Sync for Everything?

It is kind of surprising that we hadn’t stumbled across this earlier but apparently there is a well developed open source and free solution for Over The Air syncing of everything from Contacts to Calendar for nearly every device you own (okay maybe that’s stretching it). There are clients for both versions of Windows Mobile, a solution for iPhone, a plugin for Outlook and even an app on the Android Marketplace for the G1. Now you know I don’t like to tell you about something unless I’ve put it through the ringer myself a few times. Well this is a different case.

Originally I wanted to bring to you a nice How-To with a video to show you how amazing it is. However the more I get my hands into the more I realize that this solution is much bigger than a simple how to. There are so many different scenarios where this particular application can come in handy. For example, Right now I have it set up to sync my Outlook, Shadow, and G1. If I had an iPhone, iPod, Java ME, Blackberry, or Symbian device I could have those setup as well.

Now here’s where it gets a little different. You can sign up for free and use their server for all your information or you can download the server software yourself and run it on your own machine. The latter is for the more advanced computer user (don’t try the second one if you don’t know anything about routers, ports, or the difference between an internal and external ip). This is the first of several posts about this service as there is a lot of ground to cover it completely. I felt an introduction is in order.

As of right now the G1 client for the service is in version 0.1. There are some mixed results that vary from person to person with some claiming complete success and others with partial success on syncing contacts. I’d like to hear from those of you that are brave up to try and set up your own server and what kind of results you get. There is a windows mobile client that works on the Shadow. It is syncing my 3000+ contacts brilliantly. The Outlook Plug-in ran like a dream.

So if you’re ready to get started and want to try using their server go to my.funambol.com and sign up. You don’t really need to setup email with them but if you want PUSH email for any of your accounts then you can give it a try (I’m going to cover that in another post). If you want to try your hand at running your own sync server then head to the Open Source portal at http://www.funambol.com/opensource

[Taken from Allshadow]