[colug-432] Samsung Galaxy S3 and Addressbook/Contacts sync

[R S Prigan]

I'm looking for reliable ways to sync (especially) my AddressBook from a
hosted site I control to my computer(s) and S3.
I am not happy about having to share all my contacts with Google, and still
having sync be flaky between my computer and phone and Google.

In the past year I had moved my calendar an contact stuff from KDE
Kontact/KorganizerKAddressbook/KMail  to Thunderbird, and used Lightning.
 I managed to get Calendar to sync from my own ICSs, hosted on a CalDAV.  I
was happy as a clam.  (Akonadi was so laggard that it is a deal breaker for
KDE's stuff!!   ...  I was also living in the pre-smart phone era:  I fired
up old SUSE 11.1 in Virtualbox and *pushed* stuff to my old phone with
BitPim <one way only>.)

N.B.  While the Thunderbird/Lightning combo works great for pulling in ICS
Calendar, the TBird Addresbook is a relic.  There are apparently plans for
totally recreating it, but for now it has limited fields and will
import/export only CSV and LDIF files  ...  I even considered setting up
LDAP on a host, as it *does* claim to be able to read in that; but it
seemed like overkill.

Ironically, it seems that Akonadi is much more capable of dealing with many
different data sources.  (I'm not in the mood to go back to that though, as
I want to keep open option to move main box to Debian, after being
primarily on KDE and SUSE since 6!)

I've had the S3 for about a month now.  I had hoped that there might be a
Thunderbird/Lightning  for Android, but no luck.  Then I could just sync
the addressbook data from the directory and carry on  ...  After all
Android "is" linux ...  kind of, sort of ... oh well !!

I have managed to get the Calendar to work (read only) via the Android
ICalSynch2 app.  I'd like this to be read-write, but can work around by
using Google Cal now for a "temporary" parking place for new events
generated from S3. "Provider for Google Calendar" extension works quite
well from Lightning to Google (and then to phone's Google account
connection)!


*The real problem is getting CONTACTS coordinated. * Forced to use Google,
I get much flakiness between:
1. Google Contacts - seemingly the most reliable place to enter new
contacts (but all the Groups can get confusing, for where it "lands")
2. Google Contacts extension for Thunderbird - bad problems getting to sync
- stuff will not transfer to Google, end up existing only locally.
3. S3 built in Google account link also seems flaky! Stuff entered there
takes a while to (sometimes) appear in Google contacts!

*I would appreciate any ideas, suggestions.  what works for you?*

What I really want is something that reliably syncs contacts from a place
where I can securely host them, without putting so much strain on the host
that they'd boot me.  Even a VCS file in the CalDAV or WebDAV would be just
fine.

The heart of the problem is reconciling Android capabilities with
Thunderbird/Lightning.

I'd even be happy with something that syncs Android directly to
Thunderbird/Lightning.

Scott
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.colug.net/pipermail/colug-432/attachments/20130624/6679598d/attachment.html