messing with funambol again
Everyone I work for/with likes their mobile phones so I decided to check out Funambol again. Also there’s been renewed interest in doing stuff without Exchange servers, so.. here we go again.
Since I have a Blackberry now, I figured that it would be more supported and more used. Funambol is also on version 7 and the last time I checked this stuff out was in version 3.5… that’s also when I got an "Opensource Rocks" or something like that T-Shirt from them… oh ya.. I’m big time 
So I got PIM sync’ing for the Blackberry and for Thunderbird and for Outlook. Long story short, what works is if I send contacts to the Funambol server with the Blackberry and then grab those contacts with Outlook and Thunderbird.
If nothing else, this is pretty cool to get contacts from the Blackberry to Thunderbird.. no need to have Outlook in the middle there anymore. However, since the Blackberry syncs over the cable connection better, and then only with Outlook, it makes this a hard sell to the non-geek community… but, for the most part, this would work.. and that’s pretty nice.
What didn’t work is when I changed anything in Outlook or Thunderbird and told the Blackberry to sync up again.. the Blackberry sync client would error out and that was the end of that.
I didn’t try the Funambol email push client. BIS works as well as I think it should without needing another app. Funambol’s email client might work better (and then again might not), but I don’t see much of a reason to switch it. I WOULD just try it, but I can’t "just do it"… you need to convert some kinda java thing A to java thing B .. or something.. anyway.. I don’t want to mess with that to try something I don’t really want to try.
Anyway.. that’s round 1 of testing.. I’ve deleted the app off the Blackberry many times now, but I put it back on again to get all my contacts from Outlook to Thunderbird.. and that’s really the only thing I’m gonna do with that for right now… local BB to Outlook sync with a cable, push that to Funambol and then pull it down with Thunderbird.
… the rest… maybe more later… but really this has to work flawlessly before I bring it before the bosses.