Let’s have all contacts synchronized!

After a long time – here comes a new post.

First of all – a question: how many devices, applications, services using some kind of contacts do you have? Mobile phone, or two, gmail, MS Outlook fetching mail from plenty of accounts…

Some of above have calendar features or even notes or email ones.

I have 4 such things. And one day, not very long ago, I found it confusing. And annoying: on each device or application contacts were disjointed. If I wanted to write a message to a friend – I had to think first where the contact information may be.

Or even better: some calendar events were at Google Calendar, some on my Nokia and some were written down in MS Outlook. Let’s keep in mind that some of them were doubled. Or tripled. Disaster…

First try

I tried to find a solution. Free solution, which got complicated. There are some free cloud solution, i.e. Google’s. http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/

I worked nearly great, because there’s no support for MS Outlook 2010. So I did a trick: I synced my Nokia to Gmail’s contacts and calendar via Mail for Exchange (http://www.businesssoftware.nokia.com/mail_for_exchange_downloads.php) and then MS Outlook to Nokia via Nokia PC Suite. Tutorials available all over the Internet are pretty descent, no problems should arise during configuration.

Running first synchronization was just a half of a success, because in my phone many items were doubled – because email address and phone number were separated into two contact entries. Fortunately traffic jams in Warsaw are enough time-consuming and within a few days I merged contacts manually. Then I did sync again and my life became easier!

Month or two later…

The solution mentioned before wasn’t enough. I couldn’t synchronize my web-mail (RoundCube or Horde) and idea of copying contacts manually isn’t funny at all. I’ve found and open source solution https://www.forge.funambol.org/DomainHome.html called Funambol – it allows you to run own synchronization server and community gives you connectors to Gmail, MS Outlook and mobile devices. And a Horde connector!

For now I’m negotiating possibility of running such a server with my hosting provider. So stay tuned, because due to poor tutorials about syncing Horde next post may be valuable!

Edit: 23.07.2010

Provider said no. So I had to export contacts to Roundcube manually: I exported (synced) contacts form Gmail and imported them in Roundcube. Seems to work The moral is: not everything can be automated…

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