SyncML: A technical perspective (Re: New kolab version ?)

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Quoting Del <delonly at gmail.com>:

> On Fri, 2008-11-07 at 16:43 +0100, Gunnar Wrobel wrote:
>> Quoting kiser Caesar <kcaesar at hotmail.com>:
>>
>> > Hello,
>> >
>> >
>> > We are a company of 15000 people and we are interested to migrating
>> > under kolab.
>> > But actually I can't making this change, because I'm waiting for
>> > the new kolab version with the sycnML support...
>>
>> You are considering switching the mail server for this amount of
>> people and the single relevant feature that is a blocker for you is
>> SyncML? Sounds strange :)
>
> Not really. It is a critical feature, and Kiser is certainly not the
> only one who sees it that way. Actually, I believe SyncML support will
> be the turning point for Kolab,

I disagree. It will certainly be nice to have some synchronization  
support and people will sync their mobiles with the server. But this  
will only be a temporary solution.

A year ago I would have agreed with you. That was *before* I  
implemented SyncML support for Kolab. SyncML has some severe problems.  
Maybe not so much in the area of the protocol. But the fact that the  
actual data exchange elements used within the protocol are being left  
undefined means that any real world implementation will only ever work  
with some devices. Not with all. There will always be a plethora of  
device specific incompatibilities.

In addition I doubt that all the little corner cases (such as a user  
that looses connection during sync) will always be handled correctly.  
The result are duplicated entries.

I deliberately describe this in a negative way. Of course things will  
often work and make users happy. But from a technical point of view  
I'm pretty convinced that SyncML is not really going anywhere. Or let  
me rephrase: I hope it is not going anywhere.

Kolab is doing one thing right: It defines a format that any client  
should be able to read and write so that all other compliant clients  
can also work with the stored data. This is a pretty robust approach  
and syncing is not.

If you want clean support for this on a mobile client it is actually  
not too difficult: You add a Kolab Format compliant IMAP client on  
your mobile device and you will be fine. No syncing, no problems.

Will future clients support this? Yes, no question. IMAP access on a  
mobile client is nothing fancy. And this is why I'm currently certain  
that SyncML is just a temporary thing.

> the years ahead are going to be very
> interesting :)

Indeed.

Cheers,

Gunnar

>
> Cheers,
> Del
>
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>



-- 
______ http://kdab.com _______________ http://kolab-konsortium.com _

p at rdus Kolab work is funded in part by KDAB and the Kolab Konsortium

____ http://www.pardus.de _________________ http://gunnarwrobel.de _
E-mail : p at rdus.de                                 Dr. Gunnar Wrobel
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