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Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

flailingmonkey.com

81–90 of 129 posts

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#81

What can we do for translated versions? I'm not a dev but my father uses google calendar a lot because it's easy and intuitive but he knows nothing about english...

Actually, you can contribute to ownCloud translations at: https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/owncloud/

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#82
post #33
post #13

One of the problems with using a self-hosted alternative like this is the fact that Google open up a lot of their services through APIs which other applications then consume. A web app I wrote a couple of years ago is one example (meetingShed). This easy integration with other apps opens up a lot of possibilities, but is there an alternative with ownCloud? It would be really interesting to see if a solution could be…

Can't read the article right now, but for contacts and calendars we have standard public APIs: CardDAV and CalDAV. Too bad Google just discontinued the latter, weirdly enough just a few months after finally supporting the former.

Unless something has changed recently, there isn't much information about Google's CardDAV implementation. I had to find a reference on a mailing list for a CardDAV implementation to even figure out what Google's URL structure looked like.

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.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#83
this post is the worst.. A) never really had contacts "disappear", although i definitely encounter conflicts with weird results (kind of expected).

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..

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#84

This seems mighty kneejerk-y. A duplicaton issue causes your contacts to disappear, therefore you should move your contacts and calendar away from a service that probably has better engineers, better backup, better redundancy, and better uptime than any one of us could possibly muster, and onto a somewhat immature product with worse functionality and integration which is by no means immune to the same kind of problem…

What about Google shutting down the open standard for syncing contact and calendar data across platforms? 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…

>It's not a "cunning plan," it's self-preservation

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.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of mentality is poisonous. You're not "polluting" your server. It doesn't add anything to the discussion; all it does is troll and set up flame-wars. 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.

Why the wording wasn't great, it is a valid concern. If you already have a server running Postgres, then maintaining a separate MySQL install really is a pain, especially when it comes to being up to date on security.

Which is fine. It's the idea that software can "pollute" is absurd. Give reasons and arguments, not slander.

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.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#86

This seems mighty kneejerk-y. A duplicaton issue causes your contacts to disappear, therefore you should move your contacts and calendar away from a service that probably has better engineers, better backup, better redundancy, and better uptime than any one of us could possibly muster, and onto a somewhat immature product with worse functionality and integration which is by no means immune to the same kind of problem…

What about Google shutting down the open standard for syncing contact and calendar data across platforms? 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…

Google moving away from open standards is a current popular opinion in bologsphere. Google has always made it super easy to take away your data. So, if you are not happy with a company than just don't take their services.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#87

This seems mighty kneejerk-y. A duplicaton issue causes your contacts to disappear, therefore you should move your contacts and calendar away from a service that probably has better engineers, better backup, better redundancy, and better uptime than any one of us could possibly muster, and onto a somewhat immature product with worse functionality and integration which is by no means immune to the same kind of problem…

I agree with your sentiment:

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!

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#89
post #43

While it's patent/licensing encumbered, I still prefer ActiveSync based solutions, just because they do good push for iOS/Android, are easy to manage, give you "free" lightweight MDM functionality, etc. 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 IM…

Do you mind citing a stable open source ActiveSync solutions ?

z-push is probably the best.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#90
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dumped ownCloud after it deleted a critical file for some unknown reason. The bug is still open. Maybe the calendar and addressbook handling is better, but I won't be trusting it.

Good to know. Well I never had problems with the calender or the bookmarks up till now (6 months going). 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?

I am not OP, but what it reportedly does is when a new file appears, if the clocks aren't exactly in sync, instead of "spreading" that file to other machines, it instead immediately deletes it because other machines are "newer" and don't have the file (or something).

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.

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