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Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

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Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#101

Post by eddieroger »

Terretta wrote: post #73
eddieroger wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's discomforting, because I just installed it. I don't really need or want the filesharing bits, but a shared family calendar has been a holy grail for my family for a while now, and this seemed to be the quickest and closest way of doing it cross-platform.

> a shared family calendar has been a holy grail for my family for a while now Out of curiosity, what's wrong with clicking the "Share" button on an iCal, sorry, iCloud Calendar? My family (incl those on Windows) finds this works well.

I suppose nothing other than I didn't know that existed. I'd fall back on the old "I like owning my data," but I will take ease of setup for a company I trust. So, looking in to that tonight.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#102

Post by eddieroger »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #44
eddieroger wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's discomforting, because I just installed it. I don't really need or want the filesharing bits, but a shared family calendar has been a holy grail for my family for a while now, and this seemed to be the quickest and closest way of doing it cross-platform.

It is a great product when it works correctly. So you should definitely give it a shot.

I am, and I've been using it as my personal calendar for about two weeks now. So far it seems fine enough, but a little wonky around editing events that repeat. Honestly, probably lack of training - I haven't spent more than 15 minutes with it per sitting, and stopped actively tinkering once I got CalDAV working.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#103

Post by koenigdavidmj »

nathanb wrote: post #70
haakon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure Google quite loves your data.

But if they lose it, do they care? It's one drop in the bucket of their analytics. The incentives I have to preserve my data are greater than the incentives they have. On their side, they have some very bright minds and some very deep pockets, as well as a proven infrastructure. But if they lose my data, they lose some analytics which may cost them pennies or perhaps dollars of ad revenue. On my side, I have myself a…

> The incentives I have to preserve my data are greater than the incentives they have.

If you lose your data, you lose your data. If Google loses your data, they probably lost that of others too, and they make the evening news.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#104

Post by sn »

What you're looking for is syncml: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyncML the wikipedia page lists various clients and servers. On Linux (well, ubuntu at least) sync-ui will sync evolution with a syncml server. After a lot of searching for solutions to use with my n900 I chose memotoo as a provider. There is an preconfigured syncml android client for memotoo.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#105

Post by sciurus »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #26

I like ownCloud but it is very immature. I mean it looks very snazzy right when you first install it and start to use it, but has a lot of little issues hidden under the surface. Couple of examples: Randomly deleting files because it got confused. Infinite loops. Essentially unusable on Windows servers (don't even try). etc. As I said, I like OwnCloud, and I think it has a very bright future ahead of it. But it isn't…

If you just care about calendars and contacts there is single-purpose CalDAV/CardDAV server software you can use. I setup Baïkal recently and got OS X and iOS syncing with it without any problems. I haven't started migrating my existing contacts and calendars to it yet, though.

Baïkal http://baikal-server.com/

Radicale http://radicale.org/

DAViCal http://www.davical.org/

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#106

Post by marssaxman »

Terretta wrote: post #73
eddieroger wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's discomforting, because I just installed it. I don't really need or want the filesharing bits, but a shared family calendar has been a holy grail for my family for a while now, and this seemed to be the quickest and closest way of doing it cross-platform.

> a shared family calendar has been a holy grail for my family for a while now Out of curiosity, what's wrong with clicking the "Share" button on an iCal, sorry, iCloud Calendar? My family (incl those on Windows) finds this works well.

Doesn't that require you to store your calendar data on Apple's servers?

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#107

Post by just2n »

Karunamon wrote: post #84
spinchange wrote: post #64

Earlier 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 barely use Calendar or Contacts. I only use Gmail for the mail -- something everything else can do, too, and it's a far cry to call gmail something impressive. By web dev standards, it's a fairly basic application.

When I got my n7, I considered Reader to be the core of the core of the core of that device. As soon as I powered it up, I was on Reader instantly reading new posts from tens of blogs I like to follow. I wasn't interested in the magazines they wanted to throw at me because immediate digital publishing has pretty much killed the magazine/newspaper industry. So for me, reading news and tech articles on my Android device WAS Reader. That's a HUGE part of why the device was purchased.

Do I use it to gmail? No, maybe to read mail, but not to respond to it because typing more than a paragraph on a touch interface is maddening. Do I use it to sync contacts? No, it's not a social device for me. Do I use it to do calendary stuff? No, I do that on my phone, so syncing both of those are turned off. The device is a web browser, game console, and news consumption engine. What drove those were Chrome, the app store, and Reader. One would think those things would be held up by Google as core parts of the platform, but maybe they want to push their own news web portal and Currents. Who knows.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#108

Post by mitchty »

spinchange wrote: post #97
donniezazen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean Caldav not webdav correct?

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#109

Post by sentenza »

Karunamon wrote: post #84
spinchange wrote: post #64

Earlier 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…

Are you really sure about calendar being a core product?

Because the userbase size (without knowing what it actually is) probably isn't all too different from that of reader.

It will probably be around forever as a part of google apps, but the free calendar for everybody might eventually face the chopping block.

Re: Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google

#110

Post by luanfernandes »

mikeratcliffe wrote: post #81
luanfernandes wrote: post #10

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/

Thanks for that! I see it's almost 100% for pt-BR! awesome :) I'll definetly try it soon
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