[Cialug] Smartphone, PDAs, & 'Syncing' Follow UP

[Nathan C. Smith]

In the world of Blackberry there are a couple proprietary synching options I am familiar with from RIM.   You can synch with your desktop outlook by itself, with Exchange through BES and with Exchange suing a free BES express-style server.  I'm not sure if there is an analog to the direct-to-Outlook sync for other operating systems.  The Encryption used would probably be a showstopper for an open source analog though one might think they would have Macs covered by now but I haven't really looked.

At one point there was a BES edition for plain SMTP, though I'm not sure if that option is still available.  It seemed to be targeted at service providers but still ran on Windows servers.

Notify-link may be another option and they may even have non-Windows software.  I heard about this from an open-source advocate friend who also likes Novell and uses GroupWise.

Some of my data has followed me from a Wizard organizer to Newton, to Palm and then to Blackberry.  When I selected Blackberry it was more like Palm w/keyboard + email than what it has become today (phone etc) but it still meets the very basic needs well.  

-Nate



> -----Original Message-----
> From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org 
> [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf Of L. V. Lammert
> Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 10:56 AM
> To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
> Subject: [Cialug] Smartphone, PDAs, & 'Syncing' Follow UP
> 
> Continuing on the thread from a few weeks ago, I am realizing 
> that in upgrading to a smartphone the more important question 
> might be  PIM, ..
> I need to also retire my Palm - while maintaining 15 years of 
> history, of course.
> 
> Andriod phones prefer Google services so the 'Cloud' is one 
> option, but I really prefer to run our own servers, pick the 
> OS, h/w, etc.
> 
> Some of the Exchange Replacements (Zimbra, Scalix, 
> Open-Xchange, & OSER appear to be choices), but it is not 
> clear how well they would work with a smartphone and 
> Evolution or Thunderbird (which would require their own 
> Exchange Connectors for Calendar & Contacts), .. realizing 
> also that this 'project' is not the typical SME Exchange replacment.
> 
> Has anyone gone this route? With Verizon, ideally? It looks 
> like Verizon offers 'Sync' services for Android platforms to 
> Exchange and, of course, there's also BES [Blackberry 
> Enterprise Server], but I'm not sure how realistic BES would 
> be as an internal server and it's certainly not OS.
> 
> TIA for any guidance,
> 
> 	Lee
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