I’ve spent the last two weeks setting up a small business with all-new Macs. They’ve thrown away two Dell towers, a Toshiba laptop and a fax machine the size of a small dog, to replace them with two iMacs, a USB modem and a MacBook. There’s also a Time Capsule, for the all-important backups.

So far so good, right? It almost came unstuck over the printing (has anyone even heard of Oki?), but I wrassled it and won. No, the problem is the hardest problem of modern computing – syncing.

First, we tried MobileMe – the boss had a spare account on his family-pack, so all we needed to do is give all the machines the same sing-in details and keep the contacts and calendars in perfect sync across the office. It’d even push changes out to the boss’s shiny new iPhone. On paper, it’s beautiful. Problem being, MobileMe seems to have been designed with one computer and one phone in mind, since it very quickly starts sucking the dicks in an office environment. After one of the secretaries spent all afternoon entering the old paper diary it promptly threw all the damn changes away.

So then we tried CalDAV. The Chandler Project is an open source service that seeks to unify all your PIM data and make it available through open-standards. Sexy, no? I can practically see Matt’s nerd-boner from here. So far so good, and it works pretty well, despite a lengthy initial sync for out four office calendars. The problem, of course, lies with Apple. It seems that Leopard’s sync services don’t actually get to write events back to CalDAV calendars – so any appointments created on an iPhone must be dropped onto their own new calendar and then manually dumped into the appropriate CalDAV share when you next sync. Tedious.

Ironic, really, that the only people who’ve truly got sync right is Microsoft – it really does seem that an Exchange server is the only way to go about this. I suppose they had to get something right besides games consoles and precision mice? But even then, the hosted solutions seem really… sketchy, and they all cost good money just for fucking calendar sync.

Nerd rage… rising.