Everything But The Kitchen Sync

I did some browsing yesterday and decided I had lived in chaos long enough.

I have a Treo 650. I have a Sun calendar. I have Yahoo! Mail. None of these things are in sync. I have a calendar appointment to manually duplicate appointments from my Treo to my work calendar. This is stupid.

Having already been curious about using some of the Google apps, I spent most of my day hammering away diligently to get my contacts and calendars in order.

1. I already use Thunderbird for my work e-mail and the Lightning add-on for my work calendar needs.
   
2. I signed up for Google Calendar and Gmail.
   
3. I used fbCal to import my Facebook birthdays and events into Google Calendar.
   
4. Sun has something called Sun Java System Communications Sync to sync Sun Java System Calendar Server with Outlook, Palm or Pocket PC. I had no idea this existed. After some tinkering, I set it so the Treo calendar would overwrite the Sun calendar, and it would not sync contacts or tasks.
   
5. I installed CompanionLink for Google to sync my Palm Desktop contacts and calendars with Google. This is the only software that costs anything; it is $30 after the 14-day trial. Unfortunately, I ran into a hiccup because the Sun software turned off the Calendar Hotsync conduit. After much tinkering and cursing, I found out you could restore the Calendar conduit by clicking the PDA icon in Communications Sync, clicking Configure, and unchecking "Calendar / Date Book" in the "Manage the following Hotsync conduits" section.
   
6. Some duplication issues made me decide, as with the Sun calendar, to make the sync one-way from Palm Desktop to Google. I plan to get this back to synchronized at some point.
   
7. Next, I set up GCALDaemon to set-up two-way sync between Google Calendar and Lightning. It also let me set up those contacts I had synced over as an LDAP address book in Thunderbird.
   
8. Lastly, I installed Yahoo! AutoSync to sync up my Yahoo! Mail and Palm Desktop address books.
   

With the dust settled, I have almost everything all synced up and without permanent damage to my data. There are only two wrinkles to the master plan: one is that I have to do two syncs (one with the Sun Communication Sync conduit, and one with the Calendar conduit), and the other is that CompanionLink is not two-way yet due to all the duplicate events in the calendar. That's something to work on another day.

I even set up my Yahoo! Mail with Thunderbird's WebMail add-on, and added GMail's IMAP server, so all my mail, contact, and calendar data is in Thunderbird/Lightning. And all my contact and calendar data from all sources is in my Treo. One device to rule them all.

UPDATE: A couple of wrinkles with Communications Sync. For one, it replaces the Calendar conduit with one of its own. Here are the steps I take weekly:

1. Sync as normal, making sure Hotsync Manager has the Calendar conduit.
   
2. Launch Communications Sync.
   
3. In the Current Profile box, I click the Palm icon and choose "Configure." Under "Manage the following HotSync conduits", I check "Calendar/Date Book" and click "OK."
   
4. From the File menu, I choose "Force Full Synchronization", then "Calendar".
   
5. Click "Synchronize" and confirm I want a full sync in the next dialog.
   
6. I hotsync the Treo.
   
7. When it asks, I tell it to overwrite the Sun calendar records with Palm records.
   
8. Almost every time it fails with an "Unknown Error." I just repeat Steps 5 & 6. The second or third time it will work. I think it may be a network issue with my calendar server.
   
9. After the sync is successful, I click the Palm icon and choose "Configure." Under "Manage the following HotSync conduits", I UNcheck "Calendar/Date Book" and click "OK." This restores the Calendar conduit, so the Treo will resume syncing with Palm Desktop.