Should MobileMe support SyncML?

As I understand it, SyncML isn't really the most modern of calendar-sharing protocols. CalDAV is much better. Yet, Mass Asay agrees with Fabrizio Capobianco that it's a shame that the new Apple MobileMe doesn't support SyncML. I guess I'm really left wondering what opportunity was lost when Apple chose to support CalDAV and didn't support SyncML. Couldn't SyncML be added to the iPhone via a third-party extension? Sure, making it a plug-in is never as good as having it baked in, but how big a deal is this? Anyone?

Funambol plans its MobileMe alternative

Funambol is stepping up to the plate with an open-source alternative to MobileMe. Initially it will sync contacts, and later, calendars. Don't expect to see any demos in Apple stores, but early adopters will spread the word quickly if it's a good alternative.

SpanningSync vs. MobileMe

SpanningSync is the obvious calendar sync competitor to Apple's new MobileMe. It's $25 a year or $65 for a one-time purchase. Yesterday the company annnounced it had passed 20,000 paid subscribers.

My complaint? SpanningSync uses Google Calendar as its back end. Google's privacy policy is never likely to be as strong as Apple's.

Now, if SpanningSync were able to develop its own back end, undercut Apple's $99 MobileMe price because it's just syncing calendars, and provide a privacy policy as good or better than Apple's, then I'd probably have to buy an iPhone.

iPhone syncers: Does $99 a year work for you?

Does $99 a year work for you? That's what Apple's new over-the-air MobileMe calendar sync costs. Of course you're paying for a lot besides that, including 20GB of storage. For us who only want calendar sync, we'd like something a bit cheaper. Never buy more calendar sync than you have to, I always say!

So, will Apple allow cheaper competition to MobileMe?

Mobile Me to drain more Apple swamp -- at what cost?

This morning, Apple's demoing MobileMe with over-the-air iCal sync from any iPhone. Still waiting to hear what it will cost. I'm sure it won't be free.

Report: Mulberry does CalDAV best

Over a Zimbra's blog, Mike Morse writes:

"If you want strict [CalDAV] specification adherence in a cross-app & cross-platform thick-client: Our winner is Mulbery for Linux, Windows, & Mac. In addition to being a Swiss-army-knife of protocols, it’s also Open Source."

Sunbird, watch out!

Jon Udell's how-to-publish series; Sunbird flakiness

Jon Udell recently published a series of blog posts on how to publish your calendar on the Web for free. They're useful tutorials. So far, he's covered Outlook 2007, Google Calendar and Apple iCal. I guess I should do the Sunbird tutorial.

Does anyone else find Sunbird itself a bit flaky, though? I've seen some strange things...entries that don't show up until later, and then are hard to delete, unless you quit Sunbird and restart.

Event attendance data sharing

Okay calendar geeks, get ready for a deep-dive...

Brian Dear, founder and chairman of Eventful, wants a standard to allow all social networks to share who's attending a particular event. At today's Data Sharing Summit 2, which I'm atttending, he convened an unconference session to talk about it.

Microformats don't get there. It took 10 minutes to add hCal to Eventful. It hasn't changed the world. Who benefits from that hCal info today? What tools can recognize there's a page now that has hCal in it?

Brian is concerned about duplication of events in the Web. Go to any UGC (user-generated content) site listing events and you're likely to see duplicates of the same event. To sort through the ensuing madness, we need a unique identifier for an event. Duplicates can contain subtle inconsistencies, or the date and time may be off.

Then we move on to the attendance problem. If you say you're going to instance A of the event, how do others who RSVPd for instance B, C and D of the same event discover that they're all attending the same event? Also, how do we make sure every attendee is only counted once, even if their RSVP is replicated across Web sites or search engines?

Could a ping server be built to aggregate events, or to search to see if other instances of an event already exist? Eventful has more than 7 million future events in its database. If Eventful opened that up in a special way that's queryable by anybody, Eventful could issue a unique identifier. Yahoo's Max Engel, who was also at this session, notes that Digg already checks for duplication of news postings. Maybe Eventful could do the same thing for events.

Another issue coming up during this talk: Not enough blogging software generates consumable metadata about events. My TypePad blog generates lists of events I will be attending. But it can't be exported in hCal format. Brian mentions that Microsoft and Eventful built a cool plug-in for Windows Live that lets Windows Live Writer users create their own events or find existing events through integrated search of the Eventful.com Web site.

Facebook generates a lot of info about who is attending an event. Brian says there are no APIs that expose this to the outside world, or to services like Upcoming or Eventful. How can the Facebook surge of attendance data be incorporated into something more widely useful on the Web?

As for the unique identifier problem, there are developer challenges (what does an event namespace look like? Who owns the authoritative instance of an event?). A Digg-like search layer may be necessary that ranks all event data and ranks it by various criteria. That would also get around the problem of ping spam. But it would require someone like Eventful to extend what they do to crawl the entire Web to build that search layer for events.

Okay, now my brain hurts!

Calgoo Hub comes to Outlook 2003

I've fallen behind a bit on things I want to write about here. Today I happen to be attending the Data Sharing Summit 2 in Mountain View, and while I have a spare moment or two, I'll be posting a bit about some things I've seen lately.

First up is a recent email I received from Calgoo, Calgoo Hub Plugin for Outlook 2003. Andrzej Kowalski's email says:

"While there are a large number of Outlook 2003 users out there, the Outlook 2003 calendar does not support subscribing to Internet calendars and publishing calendars as does Sunbird, Outlook 2007 and Apple iCal. We wrote [the] Calgoo Hub plugin to add these capabilities to Outlook 2003 and further extend the accessibility of the Calgoo Hub platform."

And yes, it earns Calgoo another +1 SwampDrain point. Microsoft should have provided this capability for Outlook 2003 long ago, rather than insisting that all Outlook 2003 users upgrade to Outlook 2007.

Also, the Calgoo Connect sync service is now available for the Mac as well.

Making Web calendars more useful

Jon Udell is trying to make Web-based calendars more useful for the average Web surfer. His efforts, like always, are bound to help.

Google Calendar Sync updated

Google just released an improved Google Calendar Sync with Microsoft Outlook.

Zimbra beefing up phone calendar

I just read that Zimbra's providing a richer calendaring experience on Java-enabled phones.

Which Outlook/Google Calendar sync is best?

Reader Catherine Adams writes me:

"I am working for a company where 50% of the people use Mac (Outlook Calendar) and the other 50% use macs. I am trying to create a common calendar that everyone can access. My initial thought was Google Calendar as this doesn't have any platform issues, however the PC users love their Outlook calendars and do not really want to have to change to a whole new calendar.

"Is there any way of syncing Google Calendar with PC Outlook, or iCal with PC Outlook.

"Basically I just want a single calendar, that everyone can edit and view but the PC users aren't going to budge from the Outlook calendars."

Here are some possibilities:

• Calgoo Connect. Trial version available. Pricing starts at $29.95 per year per user with volume discounts
• Google Calendar Sync, currently in beta. Free. I haven't tried it. Robert Scoble has some complaints about it.
• Cemaphore Systems's MailShadow for Google Apps also recently entered beta. Scoble writes (in the same post as the Gcal complaints): "When I enter a calendar item in Microsoft Outlook it instantly appeared in Google Calendar." Ultimate price is unknown. MailShadow also does more than calendar sync, possibly violating Mace's First Law of Calendar Interoperability: Never use more calendar, or more interoperability, than you absolutely need.
• Plaxo offers sync between Google Calendar and Outlook, but a Google engineer recommends against using it.
• SyncMyCal is $25 per user with price breaks starting at 5 users or more. It's been out for a while -- I first wrote about it in January 2007. More recently, SyncMyCal added full category based synchronization, which if I were still using Outlook would be a big thing for me.

Did I miss any?

I've started the first Calendar Swamp poll to let everyone vote for their favorite Outlook-to-Google Calendar sync solution. Look in the sidebar of the Calendar Swamp blog for this poll. I'll leave this poll open until the end of June, by which time, probably there will be something new.

(This list doesn't include ways to publish or subscribe between calendars. We're talking about the ability to fully sync them -- respecting added, moved, or changed events.)

Google Calendar had a major outage

The SpanningSync blog reports that Google Calendar experienced a major outage in the past few days.

Since I don't rely upon Google Calendar, I wasn't aware of any problems. :)

Zimbra's CalDAV support gets a good review

Matt Asay: CalDav + Zimbra rocks.

FuseCal launches

ReadWriteWeb says:

"FuseCal lets you sync any calendar to any calendar, while also providing filters that let you limit the types of events that are included in the sync."

I haven't tried it since earlier days when it wasn't quite ready for prime time, but it's an innovative quasi-screen scraper/Web page calendar detector that looks promising. I'll be trying it out with Mozilla Sunbird in a few days to see if they play well together.

UPDATE: My quick check of FuseCal reveals that any FuseCal can import an .ics file to any compatible calendar, but only supports a limited set of calendars for subscribing to iCal feeds. Here's hoping they add Sunbird subscription support soon.

MailShadow to sync Outlook, Google Calendar

The New York Times reports:

"MailShadow is the first service that automatically brings together synchronization for mail, calendars and address books between [Outlook and Gmail]...There is a catch. MailShadow will be free for now, but the company may start charging customers in the future."

Yep, every calendar-sharing service has to make money. The ways and means often take time to reveal themselves.

Entourage 2008 breaks Blackberry sync?

I don't know the entire story here, but it appears that Microsoft Entourage 2008 breaks the Blackberry sync capability introduced by Research in Motion in 2006.

BirdieSync works! Deleting Outlook 2003 did the trick

Well, it wasn't that simple. But almost.

It turns out I had two problems. One was that BirdieSync was trying to sync calendars from both Outlook and Sunbird. It didn't like that. By trial and error, I discovered how to unselect the Outlook calendar. But Active Sync still wasn't happy. At one point it demanded my Microsoft Office 2003 registration code. Since the PC in question had only a 60-day trial version of Office 2003 installed, this seemed like a ridiculous request. But the only way to make it go away that I could find was to remove the Office 2003 trial version from the PC using add/remove programs.

After that, synchronization proceeded! BirdieSync delivered calendar sync between Sunbird and Windows Mobile Calendar and earns a SwampDrain rating of +2. I can now update my calendar on Windows Mobile, and have selected events published to my wife River's Apple iCal calendar, or other calendars that I may deem appropriate.

Given the performance complaints I'm reading about Outlook 2007, I am extremely happy I didn't have to swallow that blue pill after all.

Somewhere in this calendar interoperability saga is something profound. Perhaps I can coin Mace's First Law of Calendar Interoperability: Never use more calendar, or more interoperability, than you absolutely need.

The second law probably would have something to say about how no truly liberating interoperability solution exists unless some crucial component of it is open source, but I'm not willing to codify that just yet.

Device-to-device over-the-air calendar sharing is now my only vista (no pun intended) remaining for this blog. At some point I'll be replacing my ancient Dell Axim with a Windows Mobile phone -- or perhaps an iPhone, I don't know -- and will give everything a fresh look at that time. For now, the journey's had its rewards, at long last!

BirdieSync installed but not working

Today I installed BirdieSync to sync my new Sunbird calendar with my Windows Mobile PDA. I had to click through some warnings about BirdieSync being untrusted and unsigned. Then I had to direct BirdieSync to the directory where Sunbird is installed. (I skipped all the stuff referring to Thunderbird, which I'm not running.)

Then, a bonus! BirdieSync lets me sync both my calendars to the PocketPC. It also let me select the default calendar where appointments and tasks I create on the PocketPC will be synchronized. Cool!

During the first synchronization, BirdieSync asks me to choose between "replace" and "combine." If I choose "combine" and if some similar elements are present on both the mobile and the PC, BirdieSync warns me it could potentially lead to duplicates if they are not absolutely identical.

However...I'm getting some sort of error: "Unable to establish a connection between the PC and the device."

Anyone out there know how to fix this? I'm thinking of reinstalling ActiveSync.