3 2 1 Contact!
Integration, I’m almost there. Contacts integration I mean. I’m not a fan of Plaxo, never have been, but for some reason I’m OK with Google having my contacts information. I guess it’s because for me Plaxo seems like they want to create a business around my contacts, while for Google my contacts are available to make my life easier while they make a business around web searches. Plus Plaxo sends out a lot of spam.
My contacts are all up to date in one place, my Thunderbird Address Book (which was migrated from my Windows/Outlook Address Book… 10 years ago?). I keep that in sync with my Google Contacts (for Gmail and other Google services) and manually update a SyncML server to keep those contacts in sync with my cell phone’s contacts (I switch phones often enough and SIM cards have too many limits for storage).
So yesterday I switched over from using SyncML (ovi.com, funambol, etc) to sync my contacts online to using Google’s Exchange Servers. I’ve been using that connection to sync my Google Calendar to my phone for a long while now (I live by my Google Calendar) and I’ve been syncing my Thunderbird Address Book to my Google Contacts using the add-on by Zindus. All along I had to manually keep my cell phone in sync, which worked great because it kept my Notes on my cell phone in sync too. But manual changes are for savages.
Now my information just needs to be updated in one place and a sync initiated manually once…
Thunderbird -> Google Contacts -> Cell Phone
I’m pretty anal, so I’ve only kept the syncing one-way, when I could just as easily allow changes to propagate both ways (i.e. I add/update a contact on my cell phone which then syncs backwards to my Thunderbird).
There are a couple of snags though. Zindus stores addresses in Google Contacts using an XML format (since addresses are stored free-form on Google). This looks pretty ugly, but I’m OK with that. I am experiencing a bug though where the street address isn’t stored, I’ve emailed their developer, hopefully this will be fixed soon.
Another snag is that I had to change my phone numbers to not have dashes and add the long-distance code to every number (i.e. 555-555-5555 to 15555555555). This shouldn’t affect anybody else though, just because the application I use on my desktop to send/receive texts (via bluetooth, cause I hate pulling my phone out of my pocket every time I get a text) requires that phone number format, otherwise the number doesn’t match up to the name in my phone’s address book.
And I really wish Google Voice and Google Wave would use my Google Apps Contacts instead of my Google Account Contacts, which were empty until I started using those two services (I don’t have a gmail address, but a Google Apps email address; same thing, but my own domain).
After all that headache, I now have all my contacts on my phone. Their home, fax, cell, work numbers, their home/work address, their screen names, birthdays, any other notes I have of them, etc etc. Feels good.
In: Tech · Tagged with: google, pim, syncml, thunderbird