For years I've been wanting to synchronise my Sony Ericsson m600i smartphone with pc software. This would both provide a backup and a comfortable way of editing my agenda, contacts, todo's and whatmore, just like I did before with my Palm devices. I already had tried the Funambol SyncML software on my own home server, but that didn't work out quite well, messing up data. ScheduleWorld had the same issues back then, as it was/is just a tweaked version of Funambol. So I stuck with having my phone as stand-alone agenda (which is quite fine with me, having it always on me) and as one of the almost-a-dozen contact stores I have on my various devices and programs.

Fast forward to a few weeks back. I started playing around with Google Calendar and quite liking it in the meanwhile. Also, Evolution has now build-in synchronisation with it, and it's really easy to synchronise with Mozilla's Lightning too. However, I'm wary of giving Google even more of my data, alongside my search history and the (rss/atom) feeds I read in Google Reader, so before I started contemplating buying an Android phone (as I'm quite liking the looks of the upcoming Nokia N97 - more pics), I decided to give the renewed ScheduleWorld a spin. Aside from having an interesting new frontend (using all kinds of javascript-y web2.0 stuff and looking at Google Calendar really well), it now seems to not mess up my data anymore. So I can finally see and edit my agenda on my workstation, laptop, phone and even comfortably on the web. It even syncs the notes on my phone.

The phone does SyncML from itself (with instructions on the ScheduleWorld site it's a breeze), but Evolution has to be helped a bit by installing syncevolution. On Debian-like systems (so on Ubuntu too), you can install it by adding the following repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list and installing the syncevolution package:

deb http://www.estamos.de/download/apt stable main

[More information]. It can also be installed on Nokia's Internet Tablets, which I'm going to try later to complete my usage, for example with the Pimlico suite. Getting your config to work with ScheduleWorld is described here in detail. I'm happily keeping my data in sync again :)