Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Sync my Kolab

SyncML support for the Kolab server has been requested for several years now. Supporting it via the modules available within Horde always seemed to be one the of easiest ways to get mobile clients to synchronize with the server. Since the newest Kolab server release candidates now provide Horde, how far is SyncML support away?

Not far at all... Univention contracted p@rdus via the Kolab Konsortium to implement SyncML support within the Kolab server.

Initially a version that would require an additional MySQL database was planned but p@rdus invested some additional time into generating purely IMAP based drivers so that SyncML support will also be available within the next Kolab release (the Kolab server does not use MySQL at all by default).

Today I was able to sync the Blackberry provided by the customer for the first time. Contacts, events, tasks all survived my minimal testing. Of course the same procedure failed once I gave the customer access to the test server...

So right now I'm entering the debugging phase and I'm starting to prepare some scripts so that people eager to try the SyncML support can install an experimental Horde version on an external web server.

Update:

A script for installing horde from CVS is now available. It also installs all the required Kolab patches for SyncML support.

You can fetch and run it like this: 

wget http://kolab.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs-kolab.cgi/*checkout*/server/horde/external-horde-cvs.sh
chmod u+x external-horde-cvs.sh
./external-horde-cvs.sh

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous5/27/2008 2:28 PM

    Hi,

    I have installed the new rc3 of Kolab 2.2.
    Are there any news about SyncML?
    Does I still need to patch Horde or Kolab?

    Thanks for your help.

    Orlando

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown5/27/2008 2:41 PM

    Kolab-2.2 won't feature SyncML. Parts of SyncML will work with Horde-3.2 but the Kolab2/OpenPKG version does not use Horde-3.2 yet. Kolab2/OpenPKG still uses Horde-3.2-rc3.

    I currently expect to see SyncML to work with the Univention Groupware server first, followed by Kolab2/Gentoo (the native port of Kolab Server to Gentoo).

    I guess SyncML might be in Kolab2/OpenPKG at the end of this year.

    Cheers,

    Gunnar

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous5/28/2008 11:22 AM

    Thank you for your answer.

    Orlando

    ReplyDelete
  4. Unknown6/18/2008 4:20 PM

    Hi,

    I'm a Gentoo user and want to give kolab a try and am also thinking about what would be the best solution to sync mail and contacts with my mobile phone. So I'm thinking about getting a cheap BlackBerry subscription from my phone provider.
    Is it already usable and included into Gentoo?

    Thanks,

    Manuel

    ReplyDelete
  5. Unknown6/18/2008 4:41 PM

    Not yet. We are currently in a final testphase for the blackberry integration and I'm busy with coding on the basics for Kolab2/Gentoo-2.2.

    The current Kolab2/Gentoo-2.1 in the overlay is in bad shape (kind of always was in bad shape from the developers point of view).

    The 2.2 version will introduce some relevant changes that allow to run Kolab on Gentoo in a sane manner. And it will also include the newest horde version ready for SyncML with Kolab.

    I hope to have first pre-releases in two months. And if I'm good and not too busy Kolab2/Gentoo-2.2 might find its way into portage by the end of the year.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous11/21/2008 12:58 PM

    Since we have November now, I have three questions:

    1. Is the above script still usable and uses the actual patches?

    2. It there a different/better way at time of this writing?

    3. Am I right that I can use this script with any Kolab without interfering the actual Kolab installation?

    ReplyDelete

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