srustamo/asynk

Flexible Bi-directional sync for Emacs BBDB, Google Contacts, MS Outlook, MS Exchange, CardDAV

Created : Wed Aug 24 22:41:42 IST 2011

This is only a short introduction and some key points of interest. For more details on how to use ASynK please refer to the included documentation, or the official website for ASynK is at: http://asynk.io/ You will find links to latest download, complete documentation, and other information on that website.

About

ASynK - Awesome Sync (by Karra), is a flexible Contacts synchronization platform written in Python. High level features include:

• ASynK allows two-way sync of Contacts across any two supported sources - Google Contacts, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange Server, any CardDAV server and Emacs BBDB.
• You can use ASynK to copy contacts from one Google account to another (say from a Google Apps account at work to a personal address before you leave your job). You can do this at the level of folders (see below)
• ASynK is the only two-way synchronization option for BBDB known to be in existence today. So if you are keen to keep your BBDB content synchronized with a mobile device or Outlook, look no further.
• ASynK works on Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. Outlook synchronization only works on Windows.
• Synchronization is granular to the level of ‘Folders’, i.e. you can synchronize one folder of Google Contacts with a Outlook folder (on Windows at work, say), and another Google folder in the same account with BBDB (On your Mac, say)
• The infrastructure is there to add more database and item types (i.e. tasks, notes, etc.), but currently only Contacts synchronization is supported.
• It is free software, and released under the GNU AGPL (Affero GPL) version 3

Installation

As you are reading this file, the most efficient installation is to clone this git repository to your machine. Then see the section titled Usage below to invoke ASynK.

Updating an earlier install

If you are updating your ASynK installation from an earlier version, please note that many new git-submodules are added to the project. So for your update to work properly you need to update all sub-modules. Recommended way to do this would be to fun the following command from the root of your ASynK directory, after you pull in the latest changes

git submodule update --init --recursive

Dependencies

ASynK is completely written in Python. For most use cases and set ups you only need to have Python 2.x (x >= 7) installed. Some additional dependencies include:

• If you wish to sync from/to MS Outlook:
  • MS Windows
  • Python 2.x (2.7 or later) for Windows
  • MS Outlook
  • Pywin32 from Mark Hammond, available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/
• On Debian (and likely Ubuntu) you will need the following packages: sudo apt-get install python-argparse
• The dateutil package available from http://labix.org/python-dateutil or https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-dateutil

Usage

The recommended way to use ASynK is to first create your own ‘sync profile’ which specifies which folders and PIM DBs you want to keep in sync. Refer to the documentation for more details.

For the really impatient, ASynK comes with two default sync profiles that kick in if no other profile is configured.

$ python asynk.py --op=sync [--dry-run] [--log=debug]

If you run the above command on Windows, the entire default outlook contacts folder will get synched to “My Contacts” on Google Contacts. (You will be prompted for your google username and password).

On any non-windows platform your ~/.bbdb will be synced to google.

For further usage help, try “python asynk.py -h”