Mobile Synchronization

I always had a big problem with mobile phones. I usually have 3 mobile phones that have different contacts on them and when I switch phones it is very difficult to find my contacts and it gets even better when I buy a new one.

To solve this problem few months ago I decided to implement a Web base SyncML implementation using PHP and MySQL and I put it online so a few friends can test it and tell me what they think. The url is http://www.thundersync.com but the registration is close and even if it was open I do not have any good documentation on how people could get it to work.

Then I discover that M…….t has a similar protocol called ActiveSync that is used to synchronize a device with the Exchange server. Quest what! This protocol is not open, what a surprise. Some people in OpenChange have done some good work reverse engineering it but it is incomplete. I would really appreciate if someone could point me to a more complete specification so I can implement it.

Content Management System

We recently tried to build a site to host a Greek music database using some of the most famous open-source CMS. The requirements for our site are high. We want it to be something like the wikipedia of Greek music. More over we would like the users to be able generate content like articles, links, picture upload and more. Any user generated content will then be reviewed by one of the editors of the site that will approve the content for publishing or return it to the user with some suggestions for improvement. We soon realised that it was impossible to build the functionality that we wanted on any of the CMS. Why? Well, to what I have experience a CMS is a standard solution to standard well defined problems with known limitations. If you want something else it is possible in many cases to build your own module but still you will inherit some of the limitations of the CMS. In many cases someone will find that building a system from scratch may be the best solution to its problem. This is why some of the best sites on the internet are not CMS based but custom applications.