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Pleasantly surprised to note that the Sony-Ericsson PC suite will out-of-the-box sync with any SyncML capable host—Funambol or eGroupware—thereby syncing your phone to the rest of your world. While I’ve got a (tiny) data plan and I’m generally happy to OTA sync, New Zealand belongs to that sub-Third World chunk of the mobile data universe where data is excruciatingly expensive and syncing by cable can be an attractive option.

Anyway, if this is relevant to your interests, it’s pretty straightforward:

Having had a good time getting Funambol working for OTA syncing is great, but it’s one part of a solution; it’s great for backup and multi-device information sharing, but it doesn’t give much in the way of, say, cross-user calender sharing.

Enter groupware solutions. (Look ma, I’m talking like an architect!)

Having poke about a bit, I’m trying eGroupware. It’s an free solution (albeit with a more featureful commercial variant); it supports PostgreSQL (a must-have for me), and it doesn’t require any kind of full stack replacement (other suites of this sort, as I have lamented in the past seem to require you replace your existing mail server, web server, and random other components). This all looks reasonably positive, as does the fact that it’s regularly producing releases and appears to be taking patches from an active community.

Funambol, formerly Sync4J, is a number of things, but the bit I care about is that it’s a FOSS SyncML server you can download, run on your own server, and appears to be widely supported by all sorts of other FOSS tools (groupware, PIM software, and so on), and offer support for a huge variety of free and non-free SyncML clients. Since I can has data plan the idea of over-the-air syncing to a SyncML host has gained greater appeal, on top of the pre-existing appeal of making it easier to share calendars and the like with Maire.

The out-of-the-box delivery for Funambol is a binary Linux package that contains a JDK, Tomcat6, an RDBMs, and Funambol itself. On the one hand, this makes getting it up and running in a one-clickish fashion kind of easy. On the other hand, if you already have a database server and app server configured (for example) this is a bit of a wasteful duplication of resources; Funambol will let you work with (some) alternatives.