Funambol

A little more than a year ago, I wrote about ScheduleWorld, a free and open source place to sync Contacts and Calendars with a wireless device. The technology worked, but the setup was painful.

Fast forward to today. Another open source company, Funambol, has stepped up to the plate, pointed to center field, and driven the ball out of the park. I was able to setup a FREE account on my.funambol.com and sync my Sprint PocketPC in under 10 minutes. If all you wanted to do was backup your contacts and calendar, you'd be done. ...And it will push-sync your email too! That's right.. all the parts of a blackberry enterprise server that you use, compatible with a multitude of handsets, for free. And it you don't trust Funambol with your data, they'll give you the server software. For free.

But wait, there is more.

A "normal" user would pop in the Outlook plugin, enter the funambol username and password and be done.

As a "not-normal" linux person, I used SyncEvolution (free, open source, not made by funambol). It wasn't terribly difficult, but the config files would likely scare off any novice users. It let me push my contacts/calendar from Evolution. These instructions were really helpful, with one correction and one addendum. The "stable" and "main" in the apt repository line are lowercase and case sensitive. Also, step 6 didn't apply to me as I used the default calendar, note, and address book names.

But wait, there is more.

I flipped the phone's funambol client to scheduleworld, pulled those contacts down, flipped it back to funambol, and uploaded them.

The moment of truth..

It worked.

I now have all my contacts from my original blackberry, the treo, evolution, Outlook on my old Pc, all on my phone!

Thank you Funambol. the portal site is awesome... It is fast, responsive, pretty, and feature rich. The outlook, windows mobile, and blackberry plugin clients work great.

Thank you Funambol, and thank you open source.

-ellie