Just thought I would update you on my experiments with Funambol.  As I previously mentioned Funambol is a data

synchronisation server which has connectors included to allow the syncing of

PIM information between mobile phones (using the inbuilt SyncML client), PDA’s

and Desktop applications such as Outlook and Mozilla.  I was able to upload contacts to the server from

my mobile phone, however I wasn’t able to sync Outlook with the server.  After a little more reading and a lot of

tailing through logs I found the problem not to be with Funambol but rather

with my home router.  The router in

question is only a basic netgear home router—using a dynamic DNS service and

port forwarding rules I had made the Funambol service on my PC accessible from

the internet, however the port forwarding was not operating correctly for

connections initiated internally—this was resolved by putting a simple entry in

to my hosts file pointing to the Funambol internal IP address (a quick fix for

testing purposes).  I can happily report

that Funambol now allows me to faultlessly synchronise contacts and calendar

entries between Outlook and my Sony Ericsson mobile phone.  I am still struggling to synchronise tasks,

these apparently present more of a challenge due to the data forma.  I’m reading mailing list archives and

analysing logs to try and have tasks synchronise correctly.  I’ll report any progress as soon as it’s made.