I am ignorant enough that I can not figure out how to make this work. I am very intrigued and would love to try it out. However at my work I don't have access to the exchange server, I am in sales, IT won't let me near the servers. Is this something I can load on my device or do I need to load it directly onto the excahnage servers?

Great find, I really would love to get it working.

If some expert could write a step-by-step howto on using this Funambol, it would be appreciated...

This looks like a really good alternative to Exchange. The only problem is that it's really difficult to understand. Can someone please provide step by step instructions on how to set up the most basic functions (Yahoo retrieval, Gmail retrieval, Outlook sync, and OTA sync to a windows mobile device)? This looks so much better than emoze. I have about 20 email addresses, 3 or 4 of which I need on my phone. Emoze doesn't support that very well, and this looks like an excellent alternative to an expensive exchange server setup.

I just stumbled across this page and wanted to add something to the conversation since I just recently spent two weeks configuring an open source groupware solution in our offices using Funambol, Kolab Groupware, and Outlook for the clients. My users are also using Blackberries.

First of all, to the best of my knowledge, Funambol is not an exchange alternative. I know that Funambol will allow synchronization of a single calendar/contact/mail source, but I don't think it is meant to handle sharing all those things between users with any flexibility.

I use Funambol as a way to allow my Kolab Groupware (exchange alternative) to communicate with mobile devices (such as blackberries). It's the middle-man.

My current configuration works perfectly, although it's not perfect, if you follow my meaning.

I have a central server running Windows Server 2008 and use VMware to host multiple virtual Linux machines on top of that.

One of the VMs is a Debian (Linux) installation running Kolab for our Groupware server, and the other VM is a Debian installation running Funambol to allow mobile device connectivity. You could probably manage to have both Funambol and Kolab running on the same server, but I always like to segregate to avoid problems.

Funambol was fairly easy to install on Debian, and there are a few resources on the net that will walk you through it if you do a bit of digging. In addition, I downloaded and installed the Funambol Administration Tool onto the Windows Server and use that as a GUI to connect to the Debian Funambol server in order to configure it remotely.

Then, I installed the Funambol applet on the Blackberry and configured it to connect to our Funambol Debian server. This was pretty straightforward and was as simple as setting up a port 8080 redirect from the internet to the server network IP in our router and entering a server:port/location and a user/pass in the Funambol applet on the phone.

Anyway, I haven't figured out how to get Funambol Server and Kolab Server to talk to each other directly yet, and after doing quite a bit of research on the topic, I don't think I'll be able to. There's a connector module for Funambol called Sync4j which can be obtained on SourceForge, but it's outdated, doesn't work with the new version of Funambol, and the project appears dead.

I am in the process of configuring a Zimbra test server on yet another Debian VM. Zimbra is another OSS Exchange alternative which I'm ideally going to use to replace Kolab since there is more documentation for connecting Zimbra and Funambol than there is Kolab and Funambol.

My temporary solution for Blackberry synchronization based off of my Kolab/Funambol setup is to install the Funambol Outlook connector on each client system (these machines also sync with Kolab using the Toltec Outlook Connector) which syncs the Outlook on the machines with the Funambol Server, which then syncs with the users Blackberry.

So, diagram wise, my current setup looks like this and works fine:
User Blackberry -(sync)- Funambol Server -(sync)- User Outlook -(sync)- Kolab Groupware Server

The downside to this setup is that the client machines have to be running in order for the users Blackberry to stay in sync since the client machine is doing the middleman sync work between Kolab and Funambol. This is OK for us, for now, since we have dedicated office computers which can be left on overnight or when people are out of the office.

The reason I'm testing Zimbra is to eliminate the client machines having to do that work and have the server handle it all.

A diagram of the setup I'm trying to achieve would look more like this:
User Outlook -(sync)- Groupware Server -(sync)- Funambol Server -(sync)- User Blackberry

It may initially seem daunting to set all this up but looking back it's really not too bad.

Anyway, that's all I have to add right now. Hope this helps you guys out.