For our March “Staff Pick” Project of the Month, we selected Outlook CalDav Synchronizer, a free Outlook Plugin that synchronizes events, tasks and contacts between Outlook and Google, SOGo, Horde or any other CalDAV or CardDAV server. Developer Alexander Nimmervoll shared some thoughts about the project’s history, purpose, and direction.
SourceForge (SF): Tell me about the Outlook CalDav Synchronizer project please.
Alexander Nimmervoll (AN): Outlook CalDav Synchronizer is the only open source Outlook plugin that offers two-way sync for CalDAV calendars and tasks, CardDAV contacts and can also handle the Google native Contacts and Tasks API. Supported Outlook versions are 2007-2016. It handles Outlook categories, mapping CalDAV server colors to Outlook category colors and syncing calendars and tasks to the categories. The plugin also handles different timezones and recurring events with exceptions and can deal with Outlook custom properties.
SF: What made you start this?
AN: The first proof of concept of this project was started in 2015 as a master thesis project at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien, Software Engineering Degree program. Motivated by the lack of free sync solutions, the goal was to develop an easy to use tool which can sync almost any CalDAV or CarDDAV server with Outlook with special focus on performance.
SF: Has the original vision been achieved?
AN: Definitely, we get a lot of positive feedback from the community and many reviews which say that our solution is the best CalDAV/CardDAV Outlook plugin on the market.
SF: Who can benefit the most from your project?
AN: Everyone who wants to integrate Outlook with an open groupware service, whether it’s a self-hosted family calendar server for three users or an open source Exchange server replacement for 5000 users in an enterprise deployment.
SF: What core need does Outlook CalDav Synchronizer fulfill?
AN: Outlook CalDav Synchronizer is the missing link in Open Source Exchange Server replacement.
SF: What’s the best way to get the most out of using Outlook CalDav Synchronizer?
AN: Use Outloook 2013 or higher with latest .NET framework and one of the preconfigured server account types of a supported server solution. Fine tune the advanced settings to your needs and read the documentation or use an automatic deployment via Active Directory group policies in an enterprise environment.
SF: What has your project team done to help build and nurture your community?
AN: We try to provide fast responses to questions, bug reports and work closely together with many server vendors.
SF: Have you all found that more frequent releases helps build up your community of users?
AN: Yes, we try to fix reported bugs fast and released quite frequently in the past, but users also have the freedom to turn off automatic search for updates of course. The average release schedule is one release every two weeks at the moment.
SF: What was the first big thing that happened for your project?
AN: When we realized that big German universities recommend our plugin to their Outlook users and more and more positive reviews and press coverage showed up in late 2015 and beginning of 2016.
SF: What helped make that happen?
AN: The project would never been such a success without the experience and passion of Gerhard Zehetbauer, the main developer of the project.
SF: How has SourceForge and its tools helped your project reach that success?
AN: SourceForge helped to make the project known to the community and provides easy ways to ask questions and report issues.
SF: What is the next big thing for Outlook CalDav Synchronizer?
AN: We started a collaboration with Nextcloud in late 2016 and are in contact with more server vendors like SOGo, and plan to offer enterprise support this year.
SF: How long do you think that will take?
AN: It is already work in progress.
SF: Do you have the resources you need to make that happen?
AN: Since we lack full-time contributors it’s always hard to find enough time for all the ideas and feature requests of the project.
SF: If you had to do it over again, what would you do differently for Outlook CalDav Synchronizer?
AN: Nothing really, since the design decisions and the goal of the project were well defined and structured at the beginning.
SF: Is there anything else we should know?
AN: Well, we are asked this a lot, unfortunately there is no Mac OS X version of the project and since C# VSTO Outlook addins aren’t even supported, we also have no plans in that direction.