Written by: Andreas Jönsson and Lars Novak

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Today’s business tools—desktop computer, laptop computer, personal digital assistant, mobile phone, and the applications that run on them—have made it much easier to access, use, and store a wealth of business data at the office or while on the move. The trouble is keeping calendars, address books, to-do lists, e-mail and other personal information management (PIM) data current across this variety of tools. The quest for seamless synchronization led to the development of several proprietary solutions to the problem. Unfortunately, most businesspeople do not tend to use applications and tools from a single vendor for all their daily communications and PIM needs.

Founded in February 2000, the SyncML initiative is a universal standard for synchronization across networks, devices, and applications from any vendor. The initiative is supported by Ericsson, IBM-Lotus, Matsushita (Panasonic), Motorola/Starfish, Nokia, Openwave and Symbian.

[First published in Ericsson Review no. 03, 2001]