Firstly, you need something on the phone which will support SyncML, the standard that allows different devices to exchange data.  To sync, install the iPhone Funambol application (iTunes store link) which is currently free and works really well.

The Funambol application itself is very simple, adding an account is easy:

• set the “Server” field to something like http://example.com/horde/rpc.php (replace the location appropriately)
• set the “Username” and “Password” fields to the same ones you use to login normally
• in the “Contacts” section of the setup, the “Remote Name” should be set to card

The “Sync Direction” can be set whichever way you prefer. A cavaet: I only do one way synchronisation.  That is, I sync my contacts from iPhone to server, but not the other way. Whilst it does work both ways, I haven’t tested it extensively. It is possible that rabid zombies will eat your firstborn if you change something on the server and try to update the iPhone.

Once these settings are updated, you can go back to the main screen and hit the big “Sync Contacts” button. If it succeeds, you will see your contacts appear on the Horde server. If not, you can always view the log from the settings menu to work out what went wrong.

One of the coolest (but most useless) features is that any photos associated with contacts will also be uploaded to the server.

Note that some fields aren’t automatically used by Horde, such as the “Home Email” and “Work Email”. This is very easy to fix, but you’ll need to ask your system administrator to have a look at this post on my blog.

Feel free to leave me a comment if you get stuck and I will endeavour to help you fix it.

• define an attribute (e.g. it is called “Home Email” and is of type “email”)
• add it to list of fields that Turba uses (so it is displayed in the right place)
• add the backend storage (so Turba can query/save the values)

For this example, we are adding the home and work email fields, which are compatible with the iPhone contacts.  This post assumes you use a database backend, if you don’t then step 3 will be slightly different.

1: Define an attribute

Firstly, check the file turba/config/attributes.php and make sure the following is present:

$attributes['homeEmail'] = array(
'label' => _("Home Email"),
'type' => 'email',
'required' => false,
'params' => array('allow_multi' => false, 'strip_domain' => false, 'link_compose' => true)
);

This defines the field “Home Email”. In recent versions of Horde this should already exist, so you shouldn’t need to modify the config. If you are creating a different type of field that does not exist already, it is easiest to copy the definition of something similar and change the label and attribute name.

2: Tell Turba we want to use this field

Next the file turba/config/sources.php needs to be edited. Find the line 'email' => 'object_email' and add below it the following two lines:

'homeEmail' => 'object_homeemail',
'workEmail' => 'object_workemail',

This tells Turba that the fields homeEmail and workEmail come from the database fields object_homeemail and object_workemail, respectively.  We also need to modify the list of tabs so that Turba knows to display our new values in the right place.

Email addresses should go on the “Communications” tab, after the existing email field, so we modify the array and insert the attribute names like below:

_("Communications") => array('email', 'homeEmail', 'workEmail', 'homePhone', 'workPhone',
'cellPhone', 'fax', 'pager'),

3: Add the backend storage

Assuming you use a database backend, this is as easy as creating two new fields in the database.  They should be named according to the values in sources.php that we defined above and should be similar to an existing row of the same type.  As we are creating email fields, we can use the same data type as the object_email row.

For this example, the following SQL will modify the database appropriately:

ALTER TABLE `turba_objects`
ADD `object_homeemail` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL AFTER `object_email`,
ADD `object_workemail` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL AFTER `object_homeemail`

The same process above can be followed for other fields that might be missing, post a comment if there is something that you’d like help adding.