* Wyncs Web Sync Solutions published by Athletic Organizational Aids
In the last issue of this newsletter, I wrote about a hosted content management system service that provides Web and communications infrastructure for K-12 schools. A feature of the service is the ability for parents to download calendar data in various formats including Microsoft Outlook and Palm OS PDAs. That feature is supplied by Wyncs Web Sync Solutions published by Athletic Organizational Aids.
Wyncs (promounced like “winks”) relies on a Microsoft IE4+ and Netscape 4.2+ plug-in (sorry, no Firefox or Opera support) that reads data formatted specifically for the plug-in from a Web site and inserts it into Outlook or Palm Desktop. Wyncs doesn’t only synchronize appointments it also does the same for contacts, tasks, and notes.
Wyncs comes in two versions:Wyncs Standard, essentially a hosted service that provides a site manager’s Windows front-end for adding, editing, and deleting items to be synchronized by the Wyncs server via links from the site.Wyncs Professional, which is a Software Developer’s Kit (SDK) that provides the mechanisms for extracting and delivering items to be synchronized from a variety of data sources including databases and comma separated variable (CSV) files.
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Wyncs Professional requires no specific platform support but for the purposes of explaining how the system works the SDK documentation shows examples in Perl that extract data from a MySQL database.
Having tried the Wyncs implementation on my son’s school Web site hosted through the SchoolFusion service I can tell you that the plug-in will handle the adding, updating, or deleting of appointment data from a Wyncs-enabled Web site completely painlessly.
My advice for anyone planning to use this system is make sure that you use the category field either using the school or site name or allowing the user to specify their own category – it makes a huge difference for end users to be able to filter by categories if they have large, complex calendars.
Wyncs Standard costs $79 per domain for the first year and $39 for each subsequent year, while Wyncs Professional is priced at $750 per domain.
