Editor’s note: This is a Guest post by Tony Maro, who is Chief Information Officer at EvriChart, Inc. He writes a blog at www.ossramblings.com and you can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TONYMARO

The Environment

Two years ago we switched our messaging platform from Exchange to eGroupWare running on Ubuntu servers and never looked back.  The majority of our users use the eGroupWare web interface, while a few are still die-hards running Outlook.  When we made the change, we implemented the Funambol desktop sync utility for the outlook users to enable them to synchronize data with the eGroupware server.  When we decided to upgrade our cellphones to the BlackBerry for data and e-mail on the go, this actually worked in our favor since our users would not need a different desktop synchronization client.

Over the past four years we’ve been slowly purging most closed-source platforms from our network.  Currently we are over 60% Linux on the desktop, and 98% Linux on servers.  Our network is protected with a custom designed Linux firewall, and our email is funneled in from our colocated web server.  This allows our internal emails to always stay behind our firewall without requiring direct access from the Internet for our internal mail server.  I knew this would create technical problems for us with BIS, so I switched over just my own phone at first for testing.

Thin Clients and the need to synchronize OTA (Over The Air)

My own desktop was dual-boot about 4 years ago, but ever since then I’ve run purely Ubuntu 64 bit desktop.  The BlackBerry CD would of course be no use to me.  There are sync options for Linux, based around the "barry" driver set, but since I only use a web interface for my calendar and contact management it meant there would be nothing locally on my computer for the BlackBerry to sync with anyway.  One of our mantra’s of network management is that if the data is not on a local computer when that computer dies, we don’t have to worry about backing up the local computers.  "Thin" or mostly web based clients are much easier for disaster recovery.

Of course this meant we would need an OTA (Over The Air) sync method for our BlackBerry phones.  Before purchasing the first 8830, I had my lead developer research what options were available and he came across the Funambol sync utility.  We saw mixed reviews online, but you expect that when you’re looking at several years of comments regarding a project.  We decided to give it a whirl and try out the Funambol sync client for Blackberry.

What is Funambol?

The Funambol core project is a free and open source mobile synchronization server that provides push email, address book and calendar (PIM) data synchronization, and device management for wireless devices, leveraging standard protocols such as SyncML. For users, this means BlackBerry-like capabilities on commodity handsets.

Configuring Funambol

First came configuring email.  We use BIS provided through our carrier instead of the more enterprise friendly BES.  This presented a few challenges due to our firewall configurations.  Our MX mail server is located out on the Internet, but houses no actual e-mail.  A little bit of jumping through hoops with the BIS web interface will allow you to set up an account that checks mail at a location and with a login separate from the Internet facing server.  Unfortunately it doesn’t allow you to change the IMAP port it connects to, but I was able to open the firewall to the internal imap server just for the IP ranges used by the North America BlackBerry servers, adding a bit of security.

The Funambol blackberry community edition client installed OTA with no difficulty at all, but every time I sent an email after installation on the first try it would fail.  I finally learned this was an issue with the client and there was a fork of the code at http://funambol-sw.krkeegan.com/ that fixed our problems.  Once installed, I was syncing my contacts and calendar automatically every few hours through the Funambol client, and emails arrived through BIS.

When to use Funambol?

If you are looking for a solution to sync your Blackberry OTA to a variety of platforms, the Funambol sync servers and clients are a viable option.  Funambol acts as the middleware, connecting various clients and servers together that originally were not designed to sync. 

I get strange looks from people when I mention that none of our Blackberry’s have ever been tethered to a computer for sync, and Funambol allowed us to accomplish that.  With the combination of Funambol and E-Groupware we can supply a sales or field support person a cellphone that is preconfigured to sync his contacts back to our web groupware software and she needs no training in how to make it all work. 

It also allows us to use a primarily Linux infrastructure and still get all the bells and whistles of competing commercial products.