Monica: Owncloud/Nextcloud integration/synchronization for CardDav/CalDav

[privong]

I was reading in the README that two of the longer-term aims for the project are:

• Be the central point of contact management, by supporting CardDav protocol.
• Be the central point of calendar events, by supporting CalDav protocol.

I think think exposing this type of information would be a great addition.

I did want to ask if there had been consideration of adding some sort of integration with owncloud or nextcloud. There's clearly some overlapping functionality in both, but neither Monica nor own/nextCloud fully duplicate the other. I could envision a scenario in which I manage a persona/work calendar from own/nextCloud and also get a calendar of birthdays and anniversaries from Monica. It would be nice if there were some way to integrate/synchronize contacts between the two.

I don't have a really concrete idea for how this could be done or what a balance would be, but I wanted to float the idea to see if this was something that might be possible as cardDav and calDav implementation was explored (cc #42).

[finitenamespace]

Just chiming in to throw some weight behind this idea too.
I keep all my contacts and calendar entries synced to Nextcloud and Outlook via cardDav & calDav. Trying desperately to find a good friendship-focused CRM that ties into that.

[altima]

👍 I would also like to have this. :) maybe I can start with a PoC when I have spare time.

[asbiin]

I use nextcloud too.
Each Monica or a nextcloud instance is a server of contacts (with some different features). If you want to synchronize each one, were do you want to do it ? Maybe consider a third client that do it, like SOGo Connector or DAVdroid client ?

[privong]

I currently sync my contacts between nextCloud and my laptop (phone) with vdirsyncer (whatever iOS uses). I guess I could set up another vdirsyncer cron job to synchronize to a Monica instance. But that would rely on my laptop being on to keep them all synchronized. Normally that's not an issue, but if I'm traveling and updating things it might be nice to have Monica be able to sync with nextcloud directly. I'm not sure if it would be something that would be better as a Primary/Secondary arrangement or with some sort of conflict resolution model?

[asbiin]

I really like Nextcloud and I would like very much to work with an integration. But one thing is we rely on standard, here it's Carddav. I don't want to create a dependance with Nextcloud, out of the standard (today it's Nextcloud, tomorrow it will be Gmail contact, then icloud... No.).
I prefer to be able to connect Monica's contact and Nextcloud's contacts with a carddav service, based on standards.

Unless someone have a better idea that will blow our mind? 😉

[finitenamespace]

Nextcloud supports Carddav. It's how I'm currently syncing contacts between my Android phone, Nextcloud server, and Outlook client on my desktop. Also my Calendar with Calddav.

[privong]

@asbiin Yeah, as @finitenamespace said, nextcloud does support Card/caldav. In my message I just meant that it would be nice to directly sync Monica <-> Nextcloud (via Card/caldav) rather than having to do Monica <-> laptop <-> Nextcloud. Sorry I wasn't clear about that in my comment.

[keunes]

I'm currently using Nextcloud, and find Monica an interesting piece of software. Would it be possible to point Monica to Nextcloud's so that it takes what's there and add to it (or vice versa), so that basically there's only one 'database' rather than two that are being synced?

[daniele-athome]

I'm currently using Nextcloud, and find Monica an interesting piece of software. Would it be possible to point Monica to Nextcloud's so that it takes what's there and add to it (or vice versa), so that basically there's only one 'database' rather than two that are being synced?

I doubt that. Monica can store so much more information that a simple DAV server can. You _could_ go out of standard by putting custom fields in Cards and Cals, but that wouldn't be good for interoperability because NextCloud also serves mobile clients, desktop clients, etc.

[privong]

@daniele-athome I don't think the idea (at least in my original feature request) was to sync all the monica information into nextcloud. What I'm interested in is:

• when a new contact is added to Nextcloud or a person's contact information is updated, sync that into Monica
• when a new person is added to Monica, optionally add that person as a contact in nextcloud.

I don't really think trying to add all the Monica-based information into a DAV contact is a good idea, for the reasons you mention. But I'd like to avoid having to add a new contact twice; once to nextxloud and once to Monica.

[keunes]

Apart from that basic synchronisation of new users via *DAV, what would be really great IMHO, is if in Nextcloud I'd be able to pull up information from Monica. In a way, Monica could be an app within Nextcloud, just like Spreed.me or Collabora.

Dreaming of potential integration, the following would be possible in an ideal world

• It could have its own tab (https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/external could be used as an alternative for this)
• It could push notifications to my Nextcloud notification menu (e.g. 'remember to congratulate X with their birthday')
• In Monica, I could click 'make appointment with this person' to add a Calendar event in Nextcloud with the person as invitee
• In the contacts app, I could click 'see contact in Monica' and the person would open in a specific tab, or even integrate with the Contacts app to display key information in a contact view

I guess these more advanced integration features would need the API. Actually, they might be a bit outside of the scope of this ticket - let me know if I should create another ticket.

[CorneliousJD]

Any headway on this? I love Monica and would use it more if I could have Nextcloud be my primary source of adding/editing contact info such as name, photo, email, phone number, birthday, but then all the fun details and CRM features being managed via Monica itself still.

[keunes]

Nextcloud just had their conference this weekend, where they announced integrations.

Imagine a widget on the new Dashboard with upcoming important events & reminders. That'd be quite cool & powerful.

[MadsMighty]

This is incredibly important for me as well, Nextcloud is the repository for all of my contacts and maintaining two separate sets of contacts to work with Monica is a much bigger roadblock then I anticipated.