Recommended Practices for Sync

You use contact information on PC software applications, mobile phones, PDA, Skype and Web applications. These platforms have different concerns of storing contact information, with different combination of data fields. Obviously only common data fields can by synchronized.

Funambol SyncML server will take care of different sets of data fields of different platforms, and a subset of stored data fields can be synchronized with mobile devices that have limited capacity. Generally a sync client running on a work station can sync the full set of stored data fields as defined in SIF-C.

As Open Contacts uses dynamic data field management, through data mapping, almost all SIF-C fields can be synchronized with Open Contacts' dynamic fields.

To maximize the number of data fields that can be synchronized, you need to keep consistent practice of managing dynamic fields. For example, if you use "Phone" to present telephone number, then don't use "Tel" in other part of the database, otherwise you add trouble to yourself.

Please follow the these guideline to have reliable synchronization with existing resources:

• Keep consistent practice of managing dynamic data fields of Open Contacts.
• As a PC application like Open Contacts and MS Outlook generally can store maximum number of data fields, do backup regularly and save the backup in a safe place. You should use the built-in backup functions of these applications, rather than sync backup.
• While there are a few public SyncML services, most of the time you should stick to only one of them as the data center of synchronization, otherwise synchronization will get confused.
• If you need to sync often to a public SyncML server and the SyncML server is temporarily unavailable or has sync feature broken, you have a few options: 1. Report the bug to the service provider and wait a few days; 2. Switch to another service provider and do slow sync among all devices you have.