The good news is Google has released version 3.0 of their Contacts Data API, which Spanning Sync uses to sync with Google Contacts.
It adds a number of features, most important of which is support for structured names and postal addresses. This means that Google will now distinguish between a contact's first/middle/last/etc name and street/ city/state/etc, so we don't have to guess at which part of a contact's name or address should go in which field in Address Book (which we have to do now). As soon as we got access to the API yesterday we started working on supporting it. That work is now largely complete, and will be part of Spanning Sync 3. We've done some interoperability testing and have had great results with Google's over-the-air sync for iPhone (which uses the Exchange ActiveSync protocol) and the new Google Apps Sync for Outlook. But other apps and devices aren't so well-behaved. The bad news is that the Google Contacts web UI itself and the Contacts application on Android devices aren't well-behaved, which can lead to data loss. When you create a contact in Address Book and sync it with Spanning Sync 3, the contact's structured names and postal addresses are sent to Google. For instance, if your contact were named "Dr. Eric E. Schmidt, Ph.D.", Spanning Sync would tell Google "namePrefix='Dr.', firstName='Eric', additionalName='E.', familyName='Schmidt', namesuffix='Ph.D.', and Google would properly store that information. But if you were to edit that contact in the Google Contacts web UI, for instance changing "E." to "Emerson", the structured data would be destroyed in Google's database. That's no good. Android's Contacts app doesn't completely destroy the structured data, but it rearranges it in ugly ways, so in this case the contact would wind up in Address Book with a first name of "Dr.", a middle name of "Eric", and a last name of "Emerson Schmidt Ph.D.". We're in contact with Google about this issues and are optimistic they'll be resolved soon. In the mean time, we're working on adding even more nice features to Spanning Sync 3, which we hope to have in beta soon. We think you'll be pleased. :-) Regards, Charlie --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Spanning Sync" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/spanningsync?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
