Back in April, I complained about the pains of data synchronization, and my friend Assaf was quick to point to the fact that syndication was a far superior solution. Last week, Spanning Partners released a data syndication service that allows events stored in Salesforce.com to be syndicated to Apple iCal and stored into your iPod. Today, I deployed this solution and used simple export/import techniques to get about 8,000 contacts on my iPod. It worked.

Subscribing to your events could not be any simpler, assuming that you are using Mac OS X. You click on a link provided by Spanning Salesforce, enter your Salesforce.com login and password, turn calendar synchronization on from your iTunes preference panel, and you’re done. Your iPod will be synchronized everytime it’s plugged to your Mac. In the background, iCal will fetch events from Salesforce.com and pass them on to iTunes, without you having to do anything whatsoever. This synchronization mechanism requires no user intervention on a daily basis, and this is precisely what makes it work.

Subscribing to your contacts is a little bit more difficult, for Spanning Salesforce does not support it yet in a format that would be natively recognized by Apple’s Address Book. The trick to make it work is to use the right text format. After a couple of attempts, here is what I came up with: first, export your contacts from Salesforce.com onto a .xls (Excel) file. Then, open the file from Excel and save it as a tab-separated .txt text file. Open the .txt file with a text editor and remove all double quotation marks (”) that have been added by Salesforce.com around account names that have a comma (like Intalio, Inc. for example), by doing a simple search and replace. Once this is done, import the file from Address Book, define missing field mappings, check that everything is correct, and click on the final ‘Ok’ button. On my older PowerPC-powered PowerBook, this process used to take a minute or two for 5,000 contacts. On my new Intel-powered MacBook Pro, it took less than 5 seconds for about 8,000. I do not know how Apple managed to improve things by two orders of magnitude, but I like it.

This solution requires a lot more work on the part of the end-user, but it’s not so much of an issue, for contacts do not have to be synchronized on a daily basis. Over time, I found that I could live with quarterly synchronization, and I expect this to remain through with such a syndication mechanism. The main benefit of course is that all my contacts are now available on an easy-to-use mobile device. Somehow, cell phones cannot handle that many contacts. Even though the export text file uses less than 600KB, the way cell phones store contacts is a lot less memory efficient, and devices equipped with 64MB of memory usually cannot handle more than 2,000 contacts. This requires that filtering rules be applied, which is something that most synchronization applications provided by default with the cell phone do not support.

Another benefit of the approach is that storing events on your cellphone is actually not that convenient, and here is why. When you’re on the phone trying to schedule a meeting, you cannot see your schedule, unless you’re using a headset and trust the multi-tasking ability of your cell phone not to drop the call while you’re browsing through calendar pages. Having your events stored onto a separate device makes things a lot easier.

Of course, this goes against the goal to combine multiple devices into one, as illustrated in this previous article. Nevertheless, I do not believe that one single device will provide everything one needs, especially if you want the device to be both a phone, a media player, an organizer and a camera. Instead, I believe in the effectiveness of smart combinations.

While they are as much a matter of personal taste as anything else, I found the following setup to be working fairly well: Sony Ericsson K790a and iPod nano. Either can fit into a shirt pocket, and they can be charged from a laptop using a USB cable with proper tips (no need to carry bulky power supplies). The Sony Ericsson K790a has a fantastic camera, and the iPod nano 4GB has enough capacity to store 500 songs and about 10,000 contacts. Now I need to find a way to streamline the contact syndication process.

Charlie, could you help me for this?