Mobility Mojo - Mobile Device Syncing is Broken

Mobile Device Syncing is Broken

My friend Simon Sharwood just Twittered this comment and it got me thinking.

Now, ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center do have their problems. Bit so do other sync solutions. For example I use iSync on my Mac with my Nokia N95. However, in the office where I work most of the time we use Windows XP and Lotus Notes so i sync the same N95 using Nokia's PC Suite. Both PC Suite and iSync work exactly as specified - as long as you use only one.

As I like to have only one diary I need to sync the N95 with both systems. In effect, the N95 is the hub and my Mac and the Win XP system are spokes. The problem is that after I sync the N95 with the Mac, the only way I can get it to sync with the Win XP system is to reset all the sync settings. Fortunately, PC Suite is smart enough to not wipe all the data off the phone and star over - it just does, what I think is a normal sync. It's just that i have to go through the initial set up every time. What a colossal waster of my time. Just to be really safe I don't sync contacts between the systems as they would be very tricky to rebuild. The calendar is easier as all the meeting invitations can still be accessed so i could manually update things if the situation was desperate.

What we need is a standardised sync protocol. For example, for appointments and meetings, you'd need IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Novell and a few others to define a minimum data set that must be synchronisable across platforms (Description, Start/End Date and Time, Last Modified Date/Time, etc). They can have extra fields to make their software different from the others but standards for the minimum data set need to be defined. The same should be done for contact and task items.

Sync software would then have to support that minimum specification so that a device that is used across more than one platform will sync correctly.

It strikes me that most of the pieces of such a protocol already exist. There's the ical standard (not to be confused with Apple's iCal application which is an implementation of the ical standard) for calendar data and vCard for contacts. PIM applications need to re-written to use those data standards and sync software needs to be designed to use them.

Is it that hard? I work in the Australian energy industry and we managed to get 40 companies to agree on standardised communications protocols for transactional data. There are only a handful of major players in the PIM business and the same in mobile operating systems. If they supported the standards in the software the sync software would follow suit.