Sync Thunderbird (Lighting extension), Outlook, ScheduleWorld and Blackberry

18 Apr 2008 by Chetan Shah.

I got hooked to Thunderbird because it is an awesome email client. Nothing like it and we have a portable version too so that you can carry the client on the usb flash drive whereever you go. Needless to say the next step was to install Lightning and make it one step closer to Outlook. My goal is to have a completely portable Email, calender, contacts and tasks (which thunderbird enables me to achieve it)

The ideal situation will be to have Blackberry’s desktop manager directly talk to thunderbird ( I am not smoking anything ) but I know it is not possible yet and may be a while before we reach that level of maturity.

After searching I bumped into www.ScheduleWorld.com (for the real hardcore go getters, you can start with www.funambol.com, install that server and so on so forth). An excellant product and kudos to the guys who maintain this thing. This product is what I would consider as the holy grail of synchronization ( I did not steal this word from one other blog which also coins it the same but it was an immediate mind response the moment I browsed the site). It certainly is the holy grail of synchronization.

Installed Outlook Plugin, Thunderbird plugin and blackberry plugin as mentioned on that site.

Before going full production live (i.e : full synchronization between outlook, thunderbird and blackberry) I wanted to test whether outlook, schedule world and thunderbird can collarborate accurately. Started running in problems one after another, recurring events like an event which occurs every tuesday and thursday in outlook do not get updated properly in Scheduleworld. Just lots of problems in general that I ended up putting atleast 20 hours over a period of a week when finally I decided that even if I get this working, I will not be sure that I can rely on the sync software. Point to note, I did not add blackberry to this mix yet, blackberry being a very “closed” device I am sure will not be easy to tackle too.

There are lot of things to take care of before you can get this machinary well oiled and working for you.

- Make sure that the date and time zone settings on Schedule World are same as your outlook and thunderbird.
- Make sure that you have the correct plugin version.
- Even synch has lots of different options by which you sync your data. This can easily confuse any user.
- Sunbird is also not 1.0 i.e : it might have bugs of its own which might create issues with regards to synch.

I do not want to undermine the developer’s tremendous efforts in creating funambol, scheduleworld and all other plugins but I think this whole technology is not ready for prime time yet. Certainly not at production level when a normal computer user can embrace it and trust it to work like a champ.

Bottomline :

1. I will wait another year (see for my test results in April 2009) as it is too time consuming and cumbersome.
2. Thunderbird as an email client is powerful and production level.
3. Do not venture to research whether Thunderbird (Lighting extension), Outlook, ScheduleWorld and Blackberry will work harmoniously together yet unless you just have loads of time at hand. And if you do find out, uninstall and all reinstall plugins, create a new schedule world account and test it again. If you can get it to working properly post the steps you took on your blog so that others can leverage it.

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