Syncing a Windows Phone 7 locally or on your own webspace

Question

I'm looking for a "simple" solution to manage my contacts/appointments without having them to upload to Windows Live / Google, as this doesn't works out of the box for Windows Phone 7 devices.

After doing some research I found Z-Push, which is a PHP Solution and offers the HTTP based ActiveSync protocol. The question now is:

1.) I could use a fully flegded Zarafa Appliance, which would mimic a complete Exchange server. This would be a little bit oversized, because I mainly want only contacts and appointments to be synced.

2.) My ideal quick-and-dirty solution would be a backend, that simply uses flat files (vcf, ical) to store the contacts. This could be completely run in an portable Apache environment, where probably my WP7 phone and Outlook could access calendar and contacts, without being too clumsy.

Does anyone know of a solution / Z-Push backend which accomplishes this task. This would hopefully end this awful misery for not being able to locally sync a Windows phone 7 with your Outlook. Or are there other pitfalls, which render this solution probably useless. I don't need multiple users here.

Answer 1

Meanwhile I've found a solution, which is not only local but can be installed also on each webhoster, who supports PHP/MySQL.

I've foundTine 2.0 with the optional ActiveSync extension. It's a fully fledged groupware solution, with user/group management. It supports email, calendar, contacts and tasks and has several import/export options. It has a really nice UI and it's easy to install. You can install it locally e.g. the XAMPP apache server distribution, so it's usable on your local PC.

For Windows Phone 7 Mango you have to apply a workaround though, to avoid the 0x8004010F error.

Solution:

• configure IMAP email access in your account
• create manually the 3 folders Draft, Sent, Trash

This is necessary, even if you don't enable email synchronization when you create the account on your Windows Phone Device.

Important:

• when installing, you must enable a rewrite rule, so the access to the Tine installation is rewritten to http://yourdomain/Microsoft-Server-Activesync. This is really important, because if this URL doesn't exists, syncing will fail.

I should mention some restrictions of this solution:

• at the moment, it mostly replaces Outlook as PC client, which is not a big problem for me, especially for the calendar, contacts and task management. That's mainly because that ActiveSync mechanism doesn't emulate an exchange server, so you can't configure Outlook with an Tine account which would be exchange type ( I didn't tried this though...)
• future Tine release may include also CalDav/CardDav, which is maybe accessible by future Outlook versions or with addins