The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth

Have recently installed a Funambol server. Suddenly a whole new world of PIM syncing is available to me.

Funambol is a syncml server. Syncml is an open standard designed to put an end to vendor specific synchronisation tools and has been adopted by virtually all of the major mobile manufacturers. Some already have syncml clients built into their phones (Nokia for example), but with Funambol you have the option of installing the Funambol client on most platforms also.

Even if you don’t have a mobile device that you want to synchronise with your email client, you will still find Funambol useful. I synchronise my Thunderbird (and Lightning) Contacts, Calendars and Tasks across 3 different PCs, as well as to my Nokia N97 and iPod Touch. You can even use it to simply backup your mobile device in the event of fault or theft.

There are also dozens of other syncing solutions for sharing data between server side applications, such as Exchange to Google, Zimbra or vtiger. I am waiting for the ability to synchronise multiple calendars from multiple sources in Thunderbird (with the lightning extension) as this will then allow easy and simple group calendar and appointment management.

It’s an exciting time at the moment where yet another open source platform brings another open standard to the masses. Hopefully, in just a short time, syncing devices and applications will be something we all take for granted.