David,

I'll invite others to chime in here, but will give you my take on syncing in general.

We've been busy working on a couple of both offline and online untethered approaches to Centric CRM.

First we worked on a true offline version requiring no app server, and no database. We got pretty far on the technology, but have not done any significant development there for a while. We got to the display and datacom parts ok, but haven't actually gotten to syncing yet.

Second, we've been working hard on webdav support for tasks, calendar items, contacts, and files. We've got a lot of the work done there, and you can see some of it on our 3.0 release. More is coming soon. This is an online/offline model, but wouldn't be of help to your boss and his Symbian phone.

Third, we've got a partner who has done a Blackberry interface, but it is an online model, which in many ways I like better.

Syncing is hard, though there are now some tools available to make the task easier. Most everyone uses a proprietary product to do syncing, and we don't like to use proprietary products. I suppose we would if we had to.

So what does all this mean? We've got a bunch of offline initiatives going, but I'm not sure any of them would be of use to your boss. We would welcome you to join our community and develop something if you are up to it. We don't have any Symbian knowledge, but we'd provide all the support we could to make your job easier. We'd want to ensure that your contribution could be merged into the core code so we could carry your stuff through our upgrade process. We'd happily start a project in the community site for it and invite others with like interests to join. We would manage the team if you want.

Want to talk offline about the possibilities? I could email you directly if you want, or we could talk right here if you prefer.

Tom

let me just put my 2c.. I think writing the syncing stuff just for Symbian might not be the best way to approch the problem.. because things might change in the future and for example your boss might like different phone or etc....

now I see better solution trying to sync Centric with Outlook for example and there are tools already on the market to sync Symbian with Outlook provided by most companies like Sony/Nokia/etc..I know it is not the cleanest approach but perhaps more universal..

tks/Paul

I am coming in from the cold here. Just been playing with the demo and installing Centric. Looking good - very nice piece of work !

If everything works as planned I am looking towards synching info from the CRM to mobile devices using SyncML (most likely with a Sync4J connector - see http://sync4j.org/).

SyncML seems to be the developing standard in that area supported by all the big players. That way synching should work with Symbian phones as well as Windows Mobile .....

Leo Gaggl
Adelaide, South Australia

Leo,

How's the weather in Adelaide? I was there about three years ago (long haul from the midwest US) and thought it was beautiful. I suppose you guys are getting ready for winter? When i was there, it was winter in Ohio, so i wasn't prepared for the heat (42deg C), and i'm fair skinned...boy did i get burnt!!!

Sorry for the offtopic post...just had to say hi :)

Bob

Hi Bob,

We have lovely autumn weather here now. 30 degrees and sunny at the moment.

G'day from down under !

Leo