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Handhelds Syncing w/ Web-Based Calendars?
hacker asks: "I have been asked many times over the past few years to support "web-based calendaring" with pilot-link, so people can syncronize their PalmOS handheld devices directly with 'online' calendaring software. The problem is...what calendaring software? I've looked at the various alternatives (PHP iCalendar, WebCal, and about two-dozen others) free and commercial, and none of them really offer a good, powerful, flexible way to integrate the same kind of data that resides on a Palm handheld device. I would write the conduit between Palm and calendaring software. Has anyone actually used a web-based calendaring product they like, and if so, which one, and why? Would the ability to syncronize your Palm handheld with your web-based calendaring software be useful?"
- they are focused on groups, not individuals
There is no 'focusing' on groups. An individual is just a group of one. Designing for groups is the more generalized solution.
I am much more aghast at the number of solutions that *don't* include support for groups.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
None of the solutions provided seemed to actually come close to answering what he wanted.. which was to sync with a Palm handheld, or at least, provide an interface that has the same kind of data that a Palm holds. Calendar, Contacts, Notes, Tasks.
Suggesting a costly proprietary solution to a problem where he is obviously developing the conduit to give away, for free, is not a good solution either. Having to pay $40k for an Oracle solution, just so he can interface a Palm device with it, is ludicrous.
One possibility would be to always use some sort of groupware suite (e.g. phpGroupWare), but:
- they are focused on groups, not individuals
On the backend, it probably doesn't make much difference if the product is focused on groups or individuals.
In the Web UI, you could probably clean up the interface a bit to remove some of the more group-based features (We don't really need "Discussion Groups", etc.
However, it doesn't seem that there is a simple way to sync your handhelds with PHPGroupWare or eGroupWare (It still lack a complete implementation.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Anyone tried this with MultiSync? It seems to provide the Palm to SyncML translation (and it will do Evolution). That would be a really cool solution if it'd work (I may have to try it now) -- but if anyone has experience that'd be great.
indeed great, my boss- out of town, killed a palm.. I went to the computer, backed the palm up to yahoo, and the new palm synched it immediately
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
As you can see in this Outlook task entry, everything looks kosher. That hash in the Note field is for DateBk5's icons.
When I sync to Yahoo!'s Calendar, I see something that looks like this. Opening the Tasks form, I see this output. No titles for any tasks.
Let's focus in on the 9/18 task. Opening that one, shows this form, where you can see the Note field is in the Title field of the Task. That's a problem. It showed an empty title in the main Tasks screen, but now shows the Note field instead of the Title.
It works fine in Outlook. It works fine in J-Pilot. Why does Yahoo!'s Calendar screw it up? (I await the reply from their maintainer).
If they had an API that was public, I could write a conduit to sync directly to it, from Linux. Judging by the fact that Intellisync is a Pumasoft product, and Pumasoft holds many patents on SyncML technologies (some of which have recently been rejected by the USPTO), I can assume that this is SyncML + authentication.
I'd rather write the conduit using a documented API, than a sniffer, however.
So you see, all is not as easy as it seems.
Hey,
You can sync from Windows with Palm Desktop and the help of the SUSE OpenExchange palm conduits to their OpenExchange server. Works great. There also is a Linux client available, haven't tried it yet.
OpenExchange is getting there, people!
-m
http://www.invisik.com
We wrote a php/oracle calendar for our university and migrated all users (30 thousand plus) to it (previously we were using netscape calendar).
.. we really should have used pear to not be oracle centric.
We also wrote a palm conduit for it for pc and mac..
It has been in production for over a year now with many thousands of users using it every day.
We were going to open source it but havent because of how oracle centric it is
I wanted everything you guys have been talking about, but couldn't find anything, so I wrote my own. It is still beta, and is GPL. It is on SourceForge at http://ssis.sourceforge.net/. It uses coldsync to syncronise the contents of a MySQL database, and PHP to give a web interface. It also does a basic sync with an LDAP server as well.
I am about to do a major re-write and I could do with some help, guys !
My current PDA is a Pocket PC (Dell Axim for those interested). The only builtin way to manage calendar information with the Pocket PC seemed to be through syncing with Outlook (no big surprise...it is all MS after all). I wanted to have my calendar available on the web, and use something other than Outlook on my desktop to manage my calendar. Plus, I wanted this all available on my Axim. So I decided to use the iCal format. This lead me to Mozilla calendar, which could sync with ical files on a web site using WebDAV. I then found PHPiCalendar which does a decent job of using an ical file to generate a web-based calendar. Since there appears to be no mechanism with the calendaring software on Pocket PC for exporting to ical format, I wrote a little application to export the contents of my Axim's calendar and upload it to my website via WebDAV. Since I use WiFi at home on my PDA from time to time, I update my calendar on my PDA and upload the changes to my website. My web-based calendar is instantly updated, and Mozilla calendar can simply refresh and grab the latest copy of the ical file from the web site. So far I've been pleased with the results. The Pocket PC app is currently limited to exporting only. I plan on adding the ability to import and resolve any conflicts, but so far that has not been a priority. Don't know if that helps any of the Palm folks much, but maybe some of the Pocket PC users out there may be interested.