In between academic projects, I’ve been trying to find a substitute for Outlook. At this point I only use it for the Calendar and Task list — could easily move contacts over to Thunderbird at this point. I installed the latest Thunderbird release, and ran across Mozilla Calendar. It uses the iCalendar standard for event data, and can use a remote data store via WebDAV. I got my hosting provider to turn on DAV and within a few minutes I had it working. With a network data store you can get to your master calendar from any computer with any iCalendar-enabled calendar app (Mozilla, Mac iCal, etc), and PHPiCalendar provides [read-only] access from any browser. The only thing missing is a way to sync iCalendar events to my Nokia 6230. The 6230’s Outlook sync software seems to be based on SymcML, which is the emerging standard, and Macs can sync iCal to phones via Bluetooth, but I haven’t run across a PC app that does this yet. The Nokia PC Suite will only sync with Outlook (and Lotus Organizer, Notes, and Outlook Express). I found something called Mobile Master, but it doesn’t seem to work… And MultiSync, not sure if that’s quite there yet. Argh! Maybe I’ve finally found the reason to switch!