Synchronize your Android phone with Group-Office without using Microsoft ActiveSync

Synchronizing Group-Office Professional using Microsoft ActiveSync is the easiest to setup and works great. But some might need an alternative. For those who don't know Group-Office yet here's a screenshot of the calendar:

I myself used to own a Samsung Galaxy S2 and I always happily synchronized this with Group-Office using Microsoft ActiveSync. I recently got myself a new LG Nexus 5 and I immediately setup ActiveSync again. But I immediately missed two important features:

1. No tasks synchronization anymore! The stock Android OS doesn't have a tasks app. 
2. I couldn't search for older mail anymore. The Samsung Galaxy had a very nice feature to search for mail on the server. So even when you only sync two weeks of mail, you could still find an older message by keyword. 

So I started looking for alternatives:

E-mail with IMAP

The e-mail solution was easy. I just setup an IMAP account that works out of the box with Android and Group-Office. Here's a screenshot of the Android e-mail app:

Contacts and Calendar sync

I found “Caldav Sync Free Beta” and “CardDav Sync Free beta” in the Google play store that were both easy to setup and work great. They are open source and free of charge as well!

The apps are implemented as a sync adapter so they seamlessly integrate with the standard android contacts and calendar application. The screenshot below just shows the standard Android calendar because that's all you will see and that's just the way it should be!

Tasks

Synchronizing tasks with Group-Office proved to be more difficult. I tried “CalDAV Tasksync beta free” and it worked, but I think it's in an early stage of development because the interface is not very good yet. But it looks promising for the future.

I also tried some other tasks apps that didn't work at all. I then decided to remove “Caldav Sync Free Beta” and replace it with “CalDAV-Sync” because it also has a nice tasks app with it. This app costs € 2,59 but it's worth the money! It also integrates nicely with the android calendar app and the tasks application looks and works great too!

Here's a screenshot of the Tasks app that synchronizes with Group-Office:

Ending

In lots of cases synchronizing Group-Office with Microsoft ActiveSync will be easier as you only have to setup one account for all. But the CalDAV alternatives work great too. It's just that you have to enter your new password four times when you setup a new one ;)

But as I did my research on these apps I came across great open source projects that might be the base of a combined tasks, calendar and contacts sync app for Group-Office!