A Looooooong day

So it's been a long day today.

I know this blog is really about LAVA and customizing Ubuntu but I thought you might be interested in some of the things I have done with it so.....

I replaced Microsoft Exchange with Citadel for several of my clients and now I'm tackling the fun chore of pushing their email to their Blackberries as well as Nokia, Window PDAs. I've read about Funambol but never setup the server in production. I played with it several months ago but never deployed it.

For those who do not know what Funambol is, it's a server software which acts like a sync server between your client device or software and the email server. It essentially syncs your contacts, calendar, tasks with your opensource email server. In this case - Citadel running on LAVA.

Citadel has been running great! No spam and fast web interface. My client reports that they have virtually no spam whatsoever compared to the several hundred spam messages per user using Exchange 2003 with the latest service packs. Not to mention that it is easier to use and admin than Exchange. So now they want to expand it to their phones. Most of them have their email already setup on the phones but like most cell phone providers it really is just a push of their email minus the contacts, tasks, and calendar. With Funambol, you get everything realtime.

So I installed a new copy of LAVA 3.0 inside a virtual machine and began printing out the documentation, compile information, etc for Funambol. 3 hours later I had a compiled version ready for testing. Not bad for a days work.

Now the task of learning how to sync all the devices and manage them remotely using the Funambol management console.