Funambol Outlook Plugin Profile Popup

This is a post to a quite small group of people. Those are the people that use the Funambol service to sync their data amongst multiple systems. I use it to sync my Calendar, Tasks and Notes between Outlook 2010 and my Android phone. It works just as it should except that if you enable the scheduling option within the plugins config application you will be hit with an Outlook popup window every time the scheduled sync fires off. This only happens if Outlook is not currently open. This is pretty much the same issue as the official Google sync application has.

I am using v9.0.2 of the Funambol Outlook plugin. I downloaded the source so I could take a stab at fixing the annoyance but I only had a few minutes to chew through it before I had to move onto some actual paid work. One thing I did notice are some short cut keys that I had not seen mentioned anywhere. As long as you have Outlook open and it is the window with focus then you can use these keys.

CTRL-F7 – Opens the plugin application and starts the sync process. You then have to manually close the plugin app.
CTRL-F8 – Opens the plugin application but does not sync.
CTRL-F9 – Opens the plugins applications config page.

So what I do now is have the scheduled sync turned off, then I just tap CTRL-F7 whenever I change my calendar, note or task entries. In reality I only change those a few times a week so this is a fine workaround until the Funambol team sort out the plugin or I get around to doing it myself.

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  • Mark Docken
    Mark Docken

    Hey – have you found a fix for this yet? It would be soooo nice to have Outlook 2010 syncing automatically without the annoying popup.

  • Anonymous
    Anonymous

    Hi, I don’t think there is anything we can do about it unless you edit the source yourself. I read it was something to do with how the app calls Outlook to open. I just do it manually now as I described in the post. It’s already been reported to the funambol dev team so I’m hoping it will get fixed at some point down the road.

  • Anonymous
    Anonymous

    When I ran the funambol Outlook Client today I got a popup stating that a new version is out 10.0.1, I just installed it and it looks like auto-syncing now works. I ran a couple of manual tests and it opens Outlook in the background, does the sync and then closes Outlook. Updated client also added video and file syncing although I’m not using either at the moment.

  • Anonymous
    Anonymous

    I only just realised that task syncing has not been happening since sometime after the last comment I made. Seems that when I updated the Android funambol client to v10.0.4 I lost the ability to sync both tasks and notes. The trick is that you can use this file to install v10.0.3 which does support task syncing.

    I found that out due to this thread where one of the funambol devs says this:

    “task and notes sync is not available in the official version, we do
    release experimental builds as the one you linked from time to time,
    feel free to use that version”

One could argue that life is a virus infecting our perfect form, which is death.

— The Zero Theorem