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Mozilla Email & Calendar PDA Synchronization?
jark writes "Outlook is, for the most part, the industry standard for contact management, personal information management and email use in the corporate workplace. We are looking in to deploying Mozilla across our network, included with the Calendar project, but have one last necessary hurdle: PalmOS synchronization. Are there currently any applications that will sync Mozilla mail, address books and calendar events with PalmOS based handhelds? If not, are there any plans in the works for this to become a reality?"
I think this is a major promo issue for Mozilla, since more and more people are getting handhelds.
I have a WinCE device, and have to jump through several loops to sync my IMAP mail at work - using Outlook. Isn't that awkward?
If people could get a simple, generic calendar/mail/contacts system that worked on both their PC and (any-brand) handheld, they wouldn't miss IE or Outlook for a second.
No sig to see here. Move along.
The calendar project is very much unfinished work, I don't think it would be a good idea to distribute it to non technical users right now. Currently the work seems to focus on getting the basic features of a calendering tool right. I suspect it will take quite a bit of time before somebody will start thinking about how to export to specific PDAs.
The tool itself looks really cool already (a zoom option would be nice, I don't like scrolling) and no doubt it will continue to develop rapidly. I think that it will be moved into the Mozilla source tree once it is in a more useable state. I don't think that that will happen before 1.1, though.
Jilles
Have you considered Evolution? You didn't specify if you are on a 'doze network, but if not, Evo apparently has built-in hooks for palm sync'ing.
I've not used it, but it looks quite polished.
Also, it goes without saying that if you don't have Linux deployed across your network, the work involved with that would likely outweigh the benefits...
Whenever I see this, it just makes me wish that most Unix apps- whether they were written against GTK+, Qt, KDE, Xlib, GTK+GNOME, Qt+KDE, XForms, FLTK, Prima, Motif, whatever- has some sort of AppleScript-like API. I know that KDE has DCOP, but that's for KDE apps, not all Qt apps. GNOME has CORBA, but again, only for GNOME apps, not all GTK+ apps.
$ pdaCal = $pda->application("Qtopia:Addressbook");
Hell, they don't even have to be standard across toolkits. I'd be extra happy if they all just responded to XML-RPC.
Now, if we had something like Apple's OSA (Open Script Architecture, what AppleScript ties in to) in these GUI toolkits, we could write a perl script to act like a "hotsync conduit" on Windoze/Mac OS with the Palm desktop.
Except, it wouldn't have to be a thousand line pain in the ass C++ app. It'd just a 10 line perl script, looking something like:
use ZaurusSync;
use MozillaOSA;
$pda = ZaurusSync->new();
$pda->openOn("/dev/ttyS1");
$cal = MozillaOSA->new()->application("Mozilla:Addr essbook");
foreach $name ( $cal->personKeys ) {
#getPerson returns undef if she doesn't exist
if ($pdaCal->getPerson($person) eq $person->asZaurusPerson) {#perhaps further checking
} else {
$pdaCal->newPerson( $person->asZaurusPerson);
}
}
$pda->close();
Now, this is hypothetical perl, it won't work, and the parts that normally would are probably malformed.
But this sort of thing is *so* far from impossible. It just has to be figured in from the start of a toolkit or even an app, which could implement it's own.
If Mac OS can do it, why can't we Unix peeps?
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
What I do, is:
- I set up a personal imap server. Fetchmail is also running on that box.
- I use evolution to sync my calendar/contacts/etc
- I can use both evo and mozmail to check out my imap mailbox
- I use programs like mailsync to synchronize my palm straight with the imap server.
That last suggestion (involving mailsync) is the most useful one. Tools like mailsync are possible because IMAP is a modern, flexible protocol. I really wish email providers and programmers would exploit it more fully, and stop pretending that POP-based tools are cutting-edge.
Why deploy a brand new browser? Why deploy something that just came out? Sure it's been tested and tested and tested and peer reviewed, but that guarantees you nothing.
IE is free. It comes with windows. It has its share of security problems but they are easily fixed and deployed. How easy do you think it will be to patch all your copies of Mozilla when something happens? And it will happen. Will you be able to use Active Directory or NT Policy patch to manage all your PC's? I assume since you don't like MS, you don't have SMS installed.
How much time do you want to "waste" getting people up to speed with a system they don't know anything about? Deploy Mozilla at home or at your friends' houses. Geek it up somewhere else.
Suck it up and go with MS - you might not like it, but all the people you support - your CUSTOMERS for all intents & purposes might not like Mozilla. They know how to use IE. They don't want to learn anything new. They'll resent you if you take away their ability to use their Palms.
My $0.02, to be sure, but look at the big picture. It's great to stand up for and support what you believe in, but I have yet to hear a good solid argument for the kind of thing you're trying to do.
I found some stuff in the Mozilla Status Updates that may interest you:
June 14th MailNews Update
The comments in the reports were written by Netscape employees. It looks like Palm sync functionality is in the early planning stages, so Netscape probably want it for Buffy, the codename for their next release after 7.0 (7.0 is codenamed MachV). Basically, it looks like it's in development but it probably won't be available in Mozilla for some time.
To be honest, I think that you will find that users want more from an office calendar these days - they want to do group views, book meeting rooms, search for free time in others diaries etc. Exactly what outlook/groupwise/notes does.
You could try moz + steltor calendar (www.steltor.com) as a reasonable compromise. This has agenda synching tools (for CE, psion and palm).
http://www.syncml.orgn et/
http://sync4j.sourceforge.
Does anyone have any practical experience with Syncml? I can't claim to have any experience with it personally, but I get the impression that it is supposed to be THE transfer format for any small device - phone, PDA etc, so why not create/use that?
I know that not everyone is onboard with Syncml, but creating proprietarysyncml filters seems more efficient that creating new proprietaryproprietary filters every time someone comes up with a new email program. That way, Mozilla, Evolution etc could all benefit from the same set of converters.
Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm hoping someone else will.
...us poor old Psionists! A unique opportunity to save another endagered species
-- Serge K. Keller