Evolution Sync

Since I was bequeathed a Palm Vx when Shari got her new PocketPC, I had to get it synchronizing with Evolution. Linux has good support for Palm. I was able to get it syncing in about an hour (that involved turning on my serial port in my BIOS). Syncing works great, but Evolution lacks the ability to publish iCal files even though it stores everything internally in iCal form.

Evolution CVS has a patch for iCal publishing, but I’m not about to mess with building that. I’ll wait till Ubuntu 5.10 comes out in October. Multisync would also be a solution but its SyncML support is broken and it doesn’t do iCal yet.  Evolution’s strength is its MS Exchange compatibility, not iCal. Perl to the rescue!

I wrote a 10 line Perl script to upload the iCal file to our website via FTP and then created an hourly Cron entry to do this. My calendar is now published at http://www.ilovemychurch.org/ical/calendars/brianglass.ics. It is viewable from any iCal enabled calendaring system including ScheduleWorld, Mozilla Calendar, and Apple’s iCal.

ScheduleWorld

I’m nearly convinced that SyncML and iCal are all you need for scheduling.

With very little trouble I was able to get Shari’s PocketPC to sync with ScheduleWorld. You download and install a SyncML client for PocketPC from the Sync4j project. It is fairly straightforward to configure it. You are then able to sync the PIM information from the PocketPC to ScheduleWorld and then access the information from the Java application. The application is actually pretty good. There are a few inconveniences in the interface, but not bad. The most frustrating thing is not being able to double-click on an event in the month view mode and get the details. You have to switch to week or day view mode to do that.

Tonight I was able to install the Sync4j client for Outlook. The PocketPC came with Outlook 2002 so I installed that and was able to sync with ScheduleWorld. There was one minor problem with a recurring event that in Outlook recurred indefinitely whereas it was only supposed to recur for 5 days. I changed it in Outlook, re-synced, and all was well in both applications. Neither Shari nor I use Outlook since we use Linux, but it’s something that needs to work.

Now I’m able to subscribe to the iCal file from both Mozilla Calendar and Evolution. I presume it will work from iCal on Macs as well. From the ScheduleWorld Java application I am able to subscribe to other people’s iCals. Outlook doesn’t support subscribing to iCal files, but ScheduleWorld also publishes Free/Busy information which is viewable from Outlook.

The next thing I would like to know is if iSync on a Mac can sync via SyncML with ScheduleWorld. Rumor has it that the Tiger version of iSync supports SyncML, but I’ve seen no documentation of that fact. Of course, a Mac user could just use .Mac and share his iCal url with the rest of us, but using ScheduleWorld would also supply the Free/Busy information for Outlook users.

Another beautiful thing is LDAP. I was able to import all Shari’s contacts into ScheduleWorld and then set Thunderbird to use the ScheduleWorld LDAP directory. You apparently can’t add contacts to ScheduleWorld from Thunderbird, but if you add them on your PocketPC or from the Java application they will be available from Thunderbird (and any other mailer with LDAP support).

We’ll use this for a while and see how it goes before I come to any conclusions.

PocketPCs and Groupware

My wife Shari got a new Dell Axim X50v last week. I’ve inherited her Palm Vx. I think I’ll take this opportunity to try and get organized a bit. I’ve never managed to keep track of things and depend on Shari to keep track of me.

This was great timing because it has allowed me to experiment with the different groupware solutions I’ve been looking at. I had tried out Contactoffice for a while, but dumped them because of their poor support for iCal, LDAP and syncing support only for Outlook. Their support was good, but many of the responses were a bit terse or snippy.

I next moved to Fusemail, which I am still using. Their iCal support was in beta and I actually was able to help them find some bugs and get it working. LDAP works well too. However, their syncing supports only Outlook as well. I asked them about future SyncML support and they haven’t responded. Their support is good, but it’s very very slow.

I’ve been eying Group-Office because of its SyncML support and the simplicity of its web interface. There is hosting available, but it is hosted in Europe. I’m not sure of the wisdom of hosting offshore. It also does not have iCal support at this time. There is the possibility of hosting this on our current ISP and managing it ourselves.

I’ve also received a suggestion that I try out SugarCRM for calendaring. I’ll add that to my list of solutions to try.

Right now I’ve got Shari hooked up with ScheduleWorld. I’ve been comparing ScheduleWorld and Universal Village since they are so similar. I’m leaning toward ScheduleWorld because it supports read-only iCal, whereas Universal Village doesn’t support iCal at all except for reading other people’s iCals. Neither does it support LDAP, which Scheduleworld does. The only drawback with these two solutions is that they don’t have a web-only interface. But since they are Java applications they’ll run nearly anywhere.

I’m also happy that Shari’s Axim came with Outlook (I didn’t own a copy previously). While she’s not using Outlook, this will give me an opportunity to test Outlook with various solutions and make sure they work well together. Now all I need is a Mac for a bit. (Hey Pete, do you have a spare one I could use for a little while ? ;)

I’ll talk more about our experiences with ScheduleWorld later this week.

Groupware

I’ve been on a quest for the last month or so to find a good groupware solution for Crossroads. It’s going to take a few posts to summarize my findings and to top it off I have not found the ideal solution yet.

The difficulty arises from our "heterogeneous" environment. We’ve got Mac, Windows, and Linux users. We’ve also got both Palm and PocketPC devices (and possibly Blackberry) that need to be synced. Finding a solution that brings all of that together is no easy task.

I had hoped to find a service that we could outsource all of this to. I’d rather not have to manage this in-house. My basic requirements for the service have been that it supports the following lengthy list.

• IMAP
• LDAP
• iCal (and consequently WebDAV)
• web interface
• outlook plug-in (since it doesn’t handle many of the open protocols)
• SyncML

For the most part, if a service will work with Mac, it will work with Linux and vice versa. The problem arises when you try to mix the Unix flavored OSes with Windows. I can find services that support most of the open protocols but don’t support Outlook. And I can find services that support Outlook (essentially hosted Exchange servers) but not the others.

The only software I have found to date that supports all of these things (some in beta form) is Open-Xchange. I actually managed to find one company that hosts this software. Unfortunately the cost is significantly higher than any of the other services available.

Over the coming days I’ll post more on this subject including info on services I’ve tried and where I think we might be headed.

The Money is in the Talent

I found this quote from a Linux Today article very interesting.

… Why acquire a Linux distro when it’s all GPL
anyway? If a distro does something you like, grab the code and
implement it yourself, right? True enough, if a distro was all about
code. But distros are about people, and people are exactly what got
purchased this week. Mandriva just hired the services of Cheek and the
rest of his paid and volunteer workers.

In a general sense, I like this notion, because it blows away
the whole "how do you make money in F/OSS?" argument. The money is not
in the code, it’s in the talent and the services. A fact that most
Linux users try to drill into the CxOs’ heads every day.

O’Reilly Open Source Convention

I just registered for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland. I didn’t get the discount, but for those who are employed full time for a non-profit you can get a 40% discount. Let me know if any of you church IT guys are planning to attend this. It would be fun to get together.

Cloth Simulation

We’re developing a superhero mascot for Kid Crossing. Blender’s new soft body dynamics will enable us to do the cape correctly. I actually got to sit down and try out Blender 2.37 last night and managed to do this cape in about 15 minutes. It’s that powerful.

This render is very simplistic with no texturing or anything and is in slow-mo so you can better see what’s happening, but it gets the point across.

Church Community Builder vs. Fellowship One

Church Community Builder just released a version with bar-code based secure check-in. When Crossroads was looking at Church Management Systems (CMS) they did not have this feature. Check-in is a basic requirement for us so we did not consider it.

We are now locked into Fellowship One (F1) since we signed a contract, but I’m still interested in hearing from users of Church Community Builder. It looks very complete and even includes website content management. F1 does not do content management (though I’m happy with Mambo).

How sophisticated is their contact management? F1 has features similar to a customer relationship management system (see SugarCRM and Why CRM Fails). This is probably its most important feature.

How does the pricing compare?

One thing that is good about this is that competition may serve to help lower the cost of these types of services.

Transparency

How much information do you show on your church website?

In the past Crossroads has been fairly minimalistic in its web content. Much of the reason for this was because it was focused nearly exclusively on first-time visitors. The best description I can think of for it is brochure-ware.

We’ve gone the other direction on our new site. Riding on the coat-tails of the blog revolution, we’re aiming to build community through our site rather than just serve up a brochure. So far it seems to be a positive thing. We’ve got some real commenting going on and it seems to be healthy. I’ve deleted a few mostly harmless pieces of graffiti, but on the whole it is going well. We’re also considering setting up chat rooms or something similar.

In addition we’re making much more information available. In the past we have excluded information that would be irrelevant to first-time visitors. This time around we thought that while some content may not be significant to a first-time visitor, it does show that we as a church have a lot of activities going on and are a thriving community.

Of course there are some things that simply don’t need to be seen by visitors. We have set some content to be viewable only by people who register and log-in on the site. This creates a multi-layered website. We’re still learning which stuff belongs in the public layer and which belongs in the registered layer. We’re also realizing that getting people to register may be more of a struggle than we anticipated.

Our logic is that people want to participate in and belong to an authentic
(transparent) community. It’s the "post-modern" culture thing. I’m curious what other web people think on this.

Army of Pens

Here's my first Blender ditty in quite a while. I didn't even use the new Blender 2.37. This was made with 2.36.

We have a thing with pens at Crossroads. We speculate that there are more Crossroads pens in Adrian, MI than any other kind of pen. ;) It is a simple kind of advertising, but it gets our name out into the community. We hand out Crossroads pens every Sunday as you enter the auditorium in order to facilitate filling out the message outline. Some of them come back, but many go out into the community. We've seen Crossroads pens at the check-out lanes of local grocery stores and all manner of places.

The intention was for this image to be a desktop wallpaper. It's probably a bit too busy for that, but it was fun to make. I am currently re-rendering with a higher sample rate on the ambient occlusion so it won't be so blotchy.

Festival of Families

Crossroads' Festival of Families this Sunday was quite remarkable. It was one of the most interactive services I've ever participated in. It was unusual for us in that both parents and kids experienced church together. The effort that went into this and the quality of the result is simply mind boggling.

IMHO, the highlight of the service was this amazing 3000 cup tower. It represents the amount of time we as parents have to spend with our kids in one year. This was contrasted with a small 40 cup tower representing the amount of time a children's ministry worker spends with a kid in a year. Yes 40 hours can make a difference, but it's really up to the parents.

(Oh, and check out the photo gallery. I'll have to plug Pony Gallery for Mambo.)

Why CRM fails

Link: SugarCEO John Roberts: Why CRM fails, part 1.

At Crossroads we’re going to be using Fellowship One (F1) as a tool to help us build a better relationship with our people, be they first-time guests, members or staff. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications have a lot in common with Fellowship One in this respect.

In this article you can replace the word "customer" with "person" and "salespeople" with "ministers" and it fits nearly perfectly.

What it boils down to is that you can have the best software in the world, but if your people aren’t using it, it doesn’t do you any good. I think the key for us will be educating and motivating people to use F1.

Do any experienced F1 users out there have any stories to share on how they’ve managed to make this work?