I mean, seriously, isn’t this just version control?  Haven’t we solved this problem a million times with Subversion, Mercurial, Git and so on?  Why is this such a big deal?  Take the latest version of the content, merge it in.  If there’s concurrent modification then identify a conflict and kick it up to the user to resolve.  Done.  Look, they even came up with a standard, SyncML, on order to normalize communication of sync information.

And yet still, in 2008, I’m sitting here on the verge of starting with a new employer, and I’m wondering about what I’m going to do about their Exchange server.  Do I go for a Mac and use Entourage?  Try to push everything into Google calendar?  Use Spanning Sync to connect up iCal?  These are a lot of acrobatics – why can’t this Just Work?

Just to demonstrate that I’m not completely talking out of a nether-oriented-orifice, I’ve even started to do some work to lend sync services to Django.  It should be no surprise that I’m letting Mercurial do the heavy lifting.

Why is this space so backwards?  Well, I’m tempted to blame Microsoft – they managed to get the whole world to buy in on Exchange.  Companies that made otherwise sane technology decisions went with classic vendor lock-in, probably because there wasn’t much else out there to compete at the time.  Microsoft (man, it feels tired just talking about this) plays well with other Microsoft products, but not well with others.  There’s no CalDAV connector for Exchange, for example, meaning there’s no standards-based access to their calendar.  Grr.

Another reason this space is so lame is because sync has been too long considered to be an application feature, rather than a service (perhaps an OS service?) available to be leveraged by various programs.  This is the approach now taken by OS X, so I guess there’s some hope.  Even in the relatively advanced world of OS X, there’s a lot of hacks still going on.  I’m currently sync’ing OmniFocus on my desktop with the OmniFocus on my iPhone, using a WebDAV server that I set up myself.  NetNewsWire syncs by using NewsGator.

Dodgy.  I mean, this sort of works, but people don’t go around rolling their own disk i/o or network stacks just because their applications use them.  This stuff should just be available to use.  And it should Just Work.

UPDATE:  Ironically, Google calendar announced CalDAV support today.