If Google just made us pay for this service (individually without having to create a Google Apps account) all our feers might go away.
Why are business SO reluctant for a standards "pay for what you get" business model?
Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
91–100 of 129 posts
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only skimmed the article. But I agree with your worry that this looks to be instructions that could put anyone who follows them at even higher risk of pain. The aesthetic of the web site doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the quality of the tools being promoted. 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 conta…
> The aesthetic of the web site doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the quality of the tools being promoted. Have you ever fired any of Oracle Corp setup/installers?
Touché. Those are awful. I'd say Oracle should be ashamed, but I'm sure Larry Ellison is feeling really bad about himself in between counting stacks of money.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#93Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#94I've self-hosted my calendar using DAViCal (http://www.davical.org/) since I got my first iPod Touch. My wife and I use it to host shared calendars that we access from our phones. I run it on a cheap box I own but it would be just as easy to host it on an inexpensive VPS. Backup is a Postgres dump taken daily stored locally on the server and rsync'd to two other machines in separate physical locations. It took a couple hours to set up but has been trouble and attention-free for years.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#95This 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…
Data corruption is unforgivable. My bank might have have better accountants, stronger safes, great hours, terrific customer service and round-the-clock security, but you can bet that if they randomly lost my money on a regular basis (or even once?) that I'd withdraw it and stuff it in my mattress until I found a better alternative.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Androi…
I didn't say anything about them shutting down the services, I said they were "silo-ing" them and clearly moving away from having them interoperate with 3rd party software.
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.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not an opinion. In the case of WebDAV, they are, in fact, moving away from open standards. It's also not about data export - it's about making commitments to businesses that pay for these services under contract and in conjunction with software that may or may not work with the apps in future.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#98This 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…
Calendaring is a big issue in enterprises, especially when you have Apple, Google and Microsoft devices with all separate calendar apps.
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.
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The aesthetic of the web site doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the quality of the tools being promoted. Have you ever fired any of Oracle Corp setup/installers?
Touché. Those are awful. I'd say Oracle should be ashamed, but I'm sure Larry Ellison is feeling really bad about himself in between counting stacks of money.
Oracle installers aren't meant to be pretty, but rather practical, they are run mostly by IT professions who know what they are doing. Remember an Enterprise solution has to conform to ADA in 57 different countries and be fully translated, must work on version current-15, must work on lynx, IE5, csh, bash, ksh, windows 31, osx and vms :)
your convenience is pretty low on their priority list...
Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
#100Nice idea. I have just gone through the minor hassle of switching my blog off of Blogger and relegating Gmail to my backup/secondary email service - all in the spirit of controlling my own stuff. I only calendar share with my wife, so setting up something like this is probably something I will do also. Any JVM based open source projects? I would rather not deal with PHP.
Not sure that's a smart move, if you care about your data. Do you think you can achieve better uptime and reliability than Google does with their engineers and servers and distributed data centres? I mean, it sounds cool and everything to do it yourself, but if you just dump all your data onto your local server (or EC2 instance), it's just a centralised storage that can fail any time, not a "cloud" any more.