Last week, I wrote about my data synchronization pains. Subsequent to this article, I got contacted by Charlie Wood, who is Principal at Spanning Partners, the company developing the excellent Spanning Salesforce RSS syndication tool for Salesforce.com.

In its current version, Spanning Salesforce.com allows any Salesforce.com user to create RSS feeds for most standard objects, including Contacts, Events, and Opportunities, but much more is coming according to Charlie. As far as I am concerned, synchronization is too difficult a problem to solve, for very good mathematical reasons, and maths are just plain hard to beat. Spanning Partners is trying to solve this problem through syndication, which I believe is the right approach. Let’s see what they come up with, hopefully very soon.

Once I get an account, my first task will be to translate the RSS feed for my Salesforce.com events into standard iCal events that could be directly published by Google Calendar. I am not exactly sure how I will go about implementing this, especially with respect to the need to publish only some events and keep the others private. I will make sure to keep you posted on my progress though.

In the meantime, I will meet Charlie at SAPPHIRE 2006 next week.