Since I replaced my trusted Treo 650 with a HTC Hero, I decided it became time that I would have a possibility to sync my calendars between my phone and my laptop. My laptop being a Mac, this quickly boiled down to a sharing solution with iCal support. Unfortunately, the HTC Hero can only connect to Exchange, Outlook and Google Calendar.

Using Google Calendar was of course not an option. I do not want to store my private calendar data on the servers of a company like Google. From the HTC Hero perspective that only left we with the Outlook/Exchange choice. As mentioned before, I also want to sync my calendar with iCal on the Mac, hence the only possible solution seemed to be Zarafa.

Setting up Zarafa proved to be straight forward. I just followed the following steps:

• Install a Centos 5 host on a kvm machine using netboot
• Run yum update on this machine and reboot.
• Download the Zarafa Community edition (I do not need more than 3 users)
• Follow the Zarafa installation manual
• Enable zarafa-ical
• Made the machine reboot proof by enabling the zarafa services with chkconfig

During this I ran into 2 very very minor problems. First of all the manual did not state that you had to extract the .tar.gz file. This is of course logical step to take, but I am a little picky about the correctness of manuals. The second issue was that sysstat is not mentioned in the dependencies of Zarafa in the manual.

After the fixing of said problems, I had a working Zarafa server which could sync with iCal. For syncing with the HTC Hero I had to install Z-push on the server to be able to use active-sync. The installation of Z-push looked very easy, however after following the installation manual and configuring the HTC Hero I ran into the following error: Account could not be created, please try again later. After some searching I found the solution here. And now it works like a charm.

2 comments

Hi Jeroen,Thanks for the feedback concerning the manual. I have changed the manual for both problems.Imar.

Thanks!