Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
flailingmonkey.com
flailingmonkey.com
Yeah.. see, I don't think the author has thought their cunning plan all the way through.
I understand the anti-google sentiment is at an all time high after the Reader shutdown fiasco, but let's stay rational, here!
I don't understand why you think that Google have a better backup service than I can provide myself. I could backup my DB once per hour if I wanted.
I am not anti Google but if a better service can be run from my own server then of course I will use it.
On their side, they have some very bright minds and some very deep pockets, as well as a proven infrastructure. But if they lose my data, they lose some analytics which may cost them pennies or perhaps dollars of ad revenue.
On my side, I have myself and whatever advice I can cobble together from friends and the Internet, a reasonable salary, and the occasional hour or two of spare time. But if I lose my data, I lose over a decade of accumulated emails and contact information.
I will gladly allow Google to back up my data (I use gmail to archive my call logs and SMS messages right now, in fact!), but I would rather be in control of the primary copy myself.
If you lose your data, you lose your data. If Google loses your data, they probably lost that of others too, and they make the evening news.
That said, I suspect a key point the author would make in response to our concern is that we can vigorously backup the server hosting our contacts and calendar when we host these ourselves. In fact, this point is precisely why I host so much of my own stuff: I can manage how data is handled. Synchronization notoriously sucks, and if some synchronization failure causes many records to suddenly vanish, it would be easier to restore those records from a self-maintained server than to plead with Google's support. I wouldn't know the first thing about recovering synchronization-scrubbed records from the devices themselves (e.g., an Android phone).
I suppose it would attack your point about "better backup" by asking what value that backup has if you can't easily leverage it to restore on demand.
Still, I feel your points about quality, redundancy, and uptime could not be easily countered.
Have you ever fired any of Oracle Corp setup/installers?
your convenience is pretty low on their priority list...
This is what happens when the buyer is not the user.
At least if you host or manage it yourself, you are only at the mercy of your own incompetence, whereas the cloud's competence is usually not something you can determine or anticipate regardless of SLA's and architecture. This gets demonstrated regularly if you watch the front page of this site :)
I still use text files, a VCS and a couple of editor wrapper scripts as I have for at least 20 years to solve the calendar and contacts problem.
I don't ask this as a form of "anti-Google sentiment," but as a legitimate question. The announcement that they would be phasing out ActiveSync support at the end of last year coupled with the announcement just made that they were doing the same for CalDAV/CardDav (when they announced the end of Reader) indicate they're "silo-ing" the service somewhat. Unless I've missed something, it's still not clear that iOS/iCal calendars are going to sync with Google's unless they "whitelist" Apple.
It's not a "cunning plan," it's self-preservation and keeping your stuff working or at the least not being at the mercy of a commercial concern who demonstrates a willingness to break it even for paying customers.
Fair enough, and I can see the value in keeping a local backup just for redundancy and convenience purposes (being locked out of my Google account for whatever reason would suck), but using it as your daily driver? Ehhhhhhh....
As far as shutdown fears, though? Calendar, Contacts, and Gmail are the core-est of the core products. They're tied directly into the Android ecosystem as well. Reader was more or less a niche product.
Google isn't going to shut down any of the holy three applications which make up the entire backbone of their mobile OS's PIM functionality. Any such fears are completely irrational.
It is not at all irrational to worry for how long your enterprise users' contacts and calendars will continue to sync.
They've thrown us a lifeline for the time being and even appear to be working on a fix for Outlook 2013 so it will sync (it doesn't as of right now), but the whole process of sunsetting support for ActiveSync then CalDAV completely tips their hand that they want to control who and what interoperates with it - and for how much longer it will interoperate with platforms beside their own
Android core PIM suite =| the entire mobile and desktop universe. There are people paying for Google's enterprise apps offering that don't use Android. What is in question is for how long core services of those apps will work outside of a browser/Android device.
When I got my n7, I considered Reader to be the core of the core of the core of that device. As soon as I powered it up, I was on Reader instantly reading new posts from tens of blogs I like to follow. I wasn't interested in the magazines they wanted to throw at me because immediate digital publishing has pretty much killed the magazine/newspaper industry. So for me, reading news and tech articles on my Android device WAS Reader. That's a HUGE part of why the device was purchased.
Do I use it to gmail? No, maybe to read mail, but not to respond to it because typing more than a paragraph on a touch interface is maddening. Do I use it to sync contacts? No, it's not a social device for me. Do I use it to do calendary stuff? No, I do that on my phone, so syncing both of those are turned off. The device is a web browser, game console, and news consumption engine. What drove those were Chrome, the app store, and Reader. One would think those things would be held up by Google as core parts of the platform, but maybe they want to push their own news web portal and Currents. Who knows.
Because the userbase size (without knowing what it actually is) probably isn't all too different from that of reader.
It will probably be around forever as a part of google apps, but the free calendar for everybody might eventually face the chopping block.
Many organizations, very large ones in fact, are interested in moving away from exchange as their mail platform and going with Gmail. However, the gripe is that calendaring with Gmail is simply utterly broken. iOS devices dont get updates, creating resources is a complete joke (if anyone at google reads this; whomever designed the method for implementing resources in gmail/ical should be fired, and stripped of their ability to code ANYTHING).
At the same time - companies are looking for greater integration with their calendars and resources and devices etc...
What would be ideal - is a standard calendar blob which any view can access via an agreed protocol (maybe caldav is supposed to be this - but from the way resources are created/accessible/scheduled, its broken).
The next layer that everyone I have been working with over the last two years is looking for is "my location as it relates to the resources I am attempting to use"
Things like wayfinding, occupancy, meeting-start-based-on-presence, issue reporting etc... are just some of the features people are looking to add to the calendar systems.
None of this will be possible if Google is willy-nilly changing what they do, support, implement etc..
The sad thing is that for core business services Google seems to be running away terrified - and I suspect this is due to their inability to understand customer support.
Honestly, is there anything that matches Google search quality of services? Is there any email hosting, paid or not, that is as feature rich as Gmail? What about online documents? Calendars and contacts? What about all the other little things I get, like Gtalk or Google hangouts?
Honestly, if there was any alternative that covered all of these with the quality of Googles services, I'd switch in a heartbeat, even if I had to pay $30+ a month for them all.
Actually, if anyone has recommendations, I'd love to hear them!
For my core functioms, outlook.com is head and shoulders better. People have probably just gotten used to how utter shit the gmail UI has become, but outlook.com is refreshingly well designed (the web client). And activesync support is of course killer.
Here's a cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...
I mean it looks very snazzy right when you first install it and start to use it, but has a lot of little issues hidden under the surface.
Couple of examples: Randomly deleting files because it got confused. Infinite loops. Essentially unusable on Windows servers (don't even try). etc.
As I said, I like OwnCloud, and I think it has a very bright future ahead of it. But it isn't "there" yet. I'd never use it in an enterprise in its current state.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with clicking the "Share" button on an iCal, sorry, iCloud Calendar? My family (incl those on Windows) finds this works well.
But I do not use it for files. So good to know, that there might be a problem.
Did it "loose" the files, deleting the files from the server, or just the "link" to the files?
There is some kind of strange race condition with the syncing. It doesn't always happen. In fact it doesn't happen very often. But most people won't accept even a "rare" random file deletion from a product they're using to protect themselves from exactly that kind of data loss.
Thank you for the work you've done on ownCloud. It's a fantastic project and it would be my first choice for hosting as I self-host everything. But a client that is willing to delete files instead of syncing them is just not worth risking for me.
Links: http://forum.owncloud.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3148 https://github.com/owncloud/mirall/issues/328
Baïkal http://baikal-server.com/
Radicale http://radicale.org/
DAViCal http://www.davical.org/
Many times grave errors like file deletion are really hard to reproduce because of special setups or other errors, that’s why we need logs and more info to be able to properly debug.
Thanks!
P.S.: This way you also throw out outdated/invalid contacts...
This syncs my calendar. I intend to do contacts the same way with CardDAV-Sync when I get round to it.
There are other good reasons to want something written in your own pet language (e.g. "I want to modify it". "I don't want to learn how to admin MySQL", even), but just claiming "pollution" isn't a good one IMO.
Already having a python/postgres stack is a valid reason to want a piece of software that runs on it. Just saying php/mysql "pollute" is a terrible mindset.
It's like saying "I won't pollute my mind with German" instead of "I have no use for German in my everyday life". One is very trollish, the other is a valid point.
However, I would say that adding PHP and MySQL to a public server just increased the attack surface as well as operations management overhead. In my eyes, that is an increase in risk/cost/etc. for that server. That justifies "pollute", "infect", "degrade", etc.
To be honest though, there doesn't really seem to be much effort to even try - maybe someone famous will step forward and get the ball rolling?
I couldn't figure out a way to list all contact lists. You had to know the name of the list and use it in the URL. Even at that, you can only access contacts in "My Contacts" or other groups. There's (seemingly) no way to access "All Contacts".
CardDAV is 'supported,' but not very well. It's definitely a second-class citizen.
Google has an API now, but who knows if it'll be there tomorrow. Google does not have a great track record at this point.
[0]https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/caldav
[1]https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/
[2]http://caldav.calconnect.org/implementations/servers.html
Do you really think you can really notice the microsecond that MySQL will be faster than SQLite? We are talking about a database that is going to host what, maybe 5 megabytes worth of data?
We are talking about calendars and contacts here, this is not stuff that you will sync every second, and will not contain large amounts of records.
Hosting this stuff in an SQLite database makes things like backup and security a whole lot easier. You don't really need a complicated database server just to store your phone numbers...
It's best when they send it as a recurring appointment and then send an "updated" version in a separate email.
There are a few open source ActiveSync tools (which may be in violation of Microsoft IP), but I just use a commercial one (for work). Still thinking of screwing with the free ones for a personal server vs. strictly IMAP.
It's $2 per account, you can host multiple domains under one control panel, it has email, contacts, and a calendar under one roof, and offers iPhone/iPad provisioning as well. You can also create subadmin accounts if you want to delegate responsibility for a certain domain to someone else.
Any JVM based open source projects? I would rather not deal with PHP.
The only thing I lose is perhaps being offline fr several hours if one of my servers goes south.
Suggestions welcome.
I just upgraded it this weekend, otherwise I haven't actually had to touch it in the 5 years since I originally set it up. Support ends for the Ubuntu LTS release it was based on next month, and I chose to migrate to new server software (dovecot) without much difficulty at all. I think anyone moderately skilled with sysadmin tendencies could manage it.
A good guide is here (though I am not running the described spam or virus filtering, and neither am I using EC2 myself): http://www.exratione.com/2012/05/a-mailserver-on-ubuntu-1204... - there are many other guides online.
But I confess I personally have a gmail account that I use most of all. I receive lots of mail daily, and none of the open-source clients (webmail or otherwise) have managed to compare in terms of usability. Priority Inbox is the most recent example of something that I would struggle to live without.
Why are business SO reluctant for a standards "pay for what you get" business model?
On the other hand, I see only technical people being able to escape such data traps.
New appointment, alarm, the days of the week, etc.
Especially if you require dropbox.
What am I missing? Phone support?
B) use a shared host (justhost.com. lol) and php over google's infrastructure? fat chance this guy is competent enough to know what the fuck he's in for down the road..
will this solution sync with my iPhone?
The fear that Contacts and Calendar will go away like Reader did (or, rather, will) is irrational. Reader barely had a mobile client version of it. With Google reigning in the branding on Android and requiring that it be tied even tighter to Google services, Gmail and Calendar became a dependency of Google's mobile OS.