This post was published 5 years 8 months 28 days ago. Therefore, it may well be out of date. Do not reply on the contents of this post being accurate. How to maintain one list of contacts across many different devices, platforms and applications.
Here’s my problem – at work I use an IBM ThinkPad T40 running Windows XP along with Lotus Notes 7 and my phone is a Nokia 6230. At home (for non-work stuff) I use an Apple PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X along with Apple Mail and Apple Address book and my phone is an Orange SPV500 running Windows Mobile 2003 (PocketPC). I also have a HP iPAQ 2750 (primarily for SatNav) also running Windows Mobile 2003 (Pocket PC) along with TomTom Mobile 5.
Now, I haven’t listed all this to show off how much kit I use. I’ve listed it like this to highlight the many contacts lists I need to maintain. I’m pretty sure most people these days have more than one and keeping them in sync is the Holy Grail in my opinion as problems with duplicate and redundant data in multiple devices can be very painful.
So, MutantMatt and I sat down and attempted to create a solution to this problem. Our requirements were to make it useable and low cost (zero cost if possible) and, to allow data to added, deleted and/or edited on any device and replicated across all and kept in sync. Also, it has to be secure.
We didn’t want to start from scratch writing an application to do all of this so we decided to use existing applications and see if we could get all devices ‘talking’ to each other.
I think we’ve cracked it (well the work side at least). More to follow soon.