Entrepreneurship

Using Thunderbird as your Groupware Client without Exchange

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ April 18, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Last week I lamented about the lack of hosted Exchange alternatives. Unfortunately, I still haven’t found a solid solution. The inherent problem is the desire to use Thunderbird as the client and sync OTA with Blackberry devices.

Using Google for shared calendar, address book, and email is the avenue I’ve been exploring. I also considered installing Kolab, an open source groupware solution, but that seemed to me analogous to installing my own Exchange server on a hosted Windows box. The only benefit there would be the presumption that an open source solution like this would have support for a wide variety of products, including my Thunderbird and Blackberry requirements.

Here’s what I’ve found works in favor of the big G.

Pros of Using Google as a Groupware Platform

• Calendar Sync to Blackberry is solid. I can only sync on calendar at a time, so I still have the problem of merging my personal gmail account with my newer google apps account (hereafter referred to as “corporate”), but that strikes me as a relatively small problem since my schedule planning is typically only a few weeks out at the most. I can also display my own personal calendar by “sharing” it with my corporate self and then sync it down that way. I now have both calendars on my Blackberry happily syncing both ways. I do wonder if there’s a limit to the number of calendars I can share…
• Mail is a no-brainer. Imap support means that, aside from the 5-10 minute lag, thunderbird and blackberry work just fine with both the personal and the corporate account. On the merging side of the equation, I’m still waiting for the corporate account to finish fetching my 50K messages from the personal account via POP (it’s google fetching from google, so it’s obviously throttled heavily), but I can continue to work from both accounts for the next few days.

Cons of Using Google as a GroupWare Platform

• They claim ownership to you data. Sure, “do no evil” is a great edict, and sure, they’ve done nothing major (although I suppose the “caving” to China’s censorship demands is arguable) to violate the public trust, but the details in the Terms of Use are pretty alarming if you’re developing any sort of intellectual property, which I happen to do every day.
• Contacts are a mess. Aside from my earlier complaints, I’ve been trying out Zindus for Thunderbird-to-Google sync, and while I’m very impressed on their development speed (the Google Contacts API was only published 45 days ago or so), the plugin still needs some work. I attempted to move my contacts from plaxo over to my corporate gmail account, since the plaxo data set should contain all the data from my legacy personal mail account plus data from plaxo itself, linkedin, and my mobile phone contact list (via blackberry –> outlook –> plaxo manually). However, I ran into a number of issues with the Zindus merge:
  • The Plaxo export to Thunderbird felt a little off. I did it at about 4am last night, so I can’t recall what was wrong with it, but I ended up tossing the Thunderbird LDIF from plaxo and merging with Outlook 2007 instead. Then I imported from there from within Thunderbird. That’s fine, but it’s worth mentioning.
  • The Thunderbird-Google sync halts when google denies a contact. So my plaxo data, which contains duplicates all over the place (a single contact might be represented as a record from the old gmail account, linkedin, and plaxo, and all contain the identical primary email, which google denies and Zindus pushes back on the user. So, basically, I’ll need to manually clean up my contact list in thunderbird before pushing it upstream. Good thing I have administrative help now.
  • Zindus does not “match up” contacts from my mobile phone. These contacts are generally an abbreviated name (i.e., a nickname, like “johnnyf” instead of “Johnny Fuery”) and a single number. The location of the number varies with regard to specific field (mobile, business, home, etc.), largely because I’ve migrated phone contacts several times over the years. Only 1% contain an email address at all. It would seem that Zindus relies on that email address for keying, becaues after attempting a dozen or so syncs, which all halted at various points in the process because of Google denying the contact add based on a duplicate primary email, the contacts that originated in my Blackberry are now duplicated a dozen times over.
  • Google won’t let me delete more than 20 contacts at a time. So starting over is going to be a major pain in the you-know-where. I now have 3500 contacts in my corporate gmail account when I started with 1900 or so in plaxo.
• The Google Apps “shared address book” is actually only intra-domain, so I can’t share my “personal” contacts. In other words, it ain’t a shared address book. I know the 8 people with accounts on my domain already and they’re IN my personal address book.
• The workaround would be to sync multiple Thunderbird installations via Zindus against the same “personal” address book. One could conceivably setup a Google account solely for contacts, configure Thunderbird + Zindus to sync against this single account, and voila — group contacts. The scalability of this model is cause for concern, however. I’ve yet to try it on more than two desks with my personal account. Zindus does authenticate against both my personal and corporate accounts, by the way.

At this point, I need quite a few utilities to make this work.

Market Opportunities

Please let me know (via the now-working Contact Form or a comment below) if you’re interested in these. Most of these I foresee being donationware and/or ad supported, but I’d also be interested in the economic value to you.

• Google “Delete all contacts” script. Go to a web page, enter you gmail login data, click a button, and flush your account. Google probably has some throttling on it, so it would probably be a “we’ll email you a confirmation in a few minutes” type of experience.
• Google contact migrator. Move contacts from an old account into a new one. See previous item for proposed interface.
• Improvements on the Zindus tool. I’d rather not write my own, but minimally, it should key against more than just the email address (the FAQ says it does, but my experience indicates otherwise) and provide a preference for skipping past problematic records. Problematic records should be outputted in a summary or log of some kind so they can be handled manually. A re-sync should not create still more duplicates (keying against more than just an email address would satisfy this).
• Thunderbird (Lightning)-Google Sync remains unanswered. GCalDaemon can do it, but it’s an awful lot of code sitting on clients for that one feature, and I’ve yet to be able to get it to work with a non-personal (Google Apps based) calendar.