ubuntuone-users team mailing list archive

[Martin Albisetti <martin.albisetti@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello fellow Ubuntu One users!

I'm excited to finally be writing this email. For over a year now, the team has 
been working on an address book contacts synchronization service that will 
raise the bar for what's currently available on Linux desktops.

Getting contacts on CouchDB and replicating between desktops and the cloud was 
the first big step. The second, and much bigger step, is to actually get those 
contacts from and to mobile phones. To achieve this, we have partnered with a 
company called Funambol[1], who share our views on open source, and have an 
established a proven software stack that synchronizes thousands of mobile 
phones and other devices. They have built a community around different client 
plugins, virtually supporting the majority of the existing software on all 
platforms that have contacts (Thunderbird, Outlook, Mac OS X Mail, etc). We are 
excited to be working with them.

Due to the costs of implementing the Funambol server, the phone synchronization 
service will only be part of Ubuntu One paid plans. But everyone (free and paid 
users) will have the opportunity to try the service and get all of their 
contacts onto their desktop for free with a 30-day trial!. The 30 days will 
only start counting once Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is released at the end of April.

More information about the mobile contacts synchronization service can be found 
at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/PhoneSync/FAQ

Right now we're at a stage where we feel confident opening up the service for 
wider testing. We strongly recommend that you have a backup of your contacts 
since we've only tested with a hand-full of phone models at this point.

We're still ramping up our servers to support new record level loads, so we 
expect the next week or two to be a bit bumpy. We should have these 
infrastructure improvements ready before the Lucid release.

All of the information to start testing is available at: 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/PhoneSync/

No matter how successful or unsuccessful the mobile contacts synchronization is 
for you, we would like to ask everyone to please fill out the test cases. They 
are critical to improving this new service for everyone.

At this point of testing, we favor IRC chats (freenode, #ubuntuone) and replies 
on this mailing list rather than creating new bugs in Launchpad. We would feel 
better if the developers filed the bugs with the proper debugging information 
rather than having dozens of bugs we can't act on. This will change in the near 
future, but for this stage, it's easier for us.

Thank you! We look forward to getting your testing results.

[1] http://www.funambol.com/

--

Martin and The Ubuntu One Team