<div>I'm looking for reliable ways to sync (especially) my AddressBook from a hosted site I control to my computer(s) and S3.</div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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>.)<br>
</div><div><div><br></div><div style="margin-left:40px!important">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.</div>
</div><div style="margin-left:40px!important"><br></div><div style="margin-left:40px!important">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!)</div>
<div><br></div><div>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 !!</div>
<div><br></div><div>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)!</div>
<div><br></div><div><br></div><div><b>The real problem is getting CONTACTS coordinated. </b> Forced to use Google, I get much flakiness between:</div><div>1. Google Contacts - seemingly the most reliable place to enter new contacts (but all the Groups can get confusing, for where it "lands")</div>
<div>2. Google Contacts extension for Thunderbird - bad problems getting to sync - stuff will not transfer to Google, end up existing only locally.</div><div>3. S3 built in Google account link also seems flaky! Stuff entered there takes a while to (sometimes) appear in Google contacts!</div>
<div><br></div><div><b>I would appreciate any ideas, suggestions. what works for you?</b></div><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The heart of the problem is reconciling Android capabilities with Thunderbird/Lightning.</div><div><br></div><div>I'd even be happy with something that syncs Android directly to Thunderbird/Lightning.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Scott</div>