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.

[finitenamespace]

Still watching this space two years on, third year's the charm! Godspeed team 🙌

[davralin]

Still watching this space two years on, third year's the charm! Godspeed team raised_hands

I just stumbled upon this, as I was looking for how to integrate nextcloud and monica better - and you should probably check out this: #3851

Looks like something is coming along just perfectly in the next release 👍

[asbiin]

@davralin well, not yet in the next release, I still have to test it, increase the reliability of the system, and there is much UI to do, but it will be here soon!

[natrius]

If i understand #5654 this correct, its now possible to point Monica to Nextcloud Contacts CardDAV URL and in that way its possible to use Nextcloud for general contact-stuff and monica for in depth contact-managing without having to maintain two seprate databases?

If thats the case, @privong this might be solved? I mean, there is no extra app within Nextcloud yet, but the basic sync is there already?

[meichthys]

@natrius AFAIK, there are no plans for a Nextcloud app, but a one way sync from Nextcloud to Monica should be possible (although I haven't seen anyone successfully implement it since it's not in the GUI yet).
I'm also not sure if there are plans to make the sync two-way, which would be awesome.

[privong]

@natrius I had missed that merged feature, and I haven't tried synchronizing monica to nextcloud via carddav. I will give it a try and report back. It might take me a bit to get to though.

For what it's worth, I probably didn't word my initial feature suggestion well enough. I wasn't seeking a nextcloud/owncloud app, but only wanted to be able to use carddav to keep my monica instance updated with the contacts in my nextcloud instance, so that I didn't have to add contacts manually to both sets of software. I think what @keunes suggested a couple years ago would be interesting to have, but is probably outside the scope of what I was thinking with this feature request.

[meichthys]

@privong Did you have any success getting things synchronized between monica and nextcloud? There's more work that needs to be done to make it work with the GUI (#5675), but perhaps the back-end sync is working?.

[privong]

I haven't been able to carve out time to test this. Unfortunately that will probably not change any time soon (party due to other demands on my time, partly because I stopped using monica late last year and so would need to install from scratch).

[meichthys]

partly because I stopped using monica late last year

Is there a reason why you stopped using Monica? And did you find a suitable alternative?

[privong]

I stopped using it due to the accumulation of several small, recurring headaches. I've tried to describe these below. But they probably have more to do with my not using docker and not devoting the time to figure out the various dependencies, than they do with Monica itself. Though I do have an unscientific feeling that the Monica dependencies are more numerous than I'm comfortable with.

• The upgrade process eventually became be a hassle for me with my self-hosted (Ubuntu 20.04, non-docker) install. I probably didn't take the time to learn how use/set-up composer properly, but at some point I was no longer able to get the upgrade commands to reliably execute. The install worked, but I wasn't confident that it was working properly, and I didn't have time to debug it. This also led to a general feeling that the software might be too fragile, because of what seems is a large number of dependencies (plus the fact that it needs a php and a node package manager).
• Related to the above, but the separation of the assets out of the release was something I never really had the time to figure out. I couldn't generate them myself (probably because of npm/yarn installation issues that I also didn't have time to debug).
• The installation and upgrade instructions are clear enough, but the failure modes of composer, npm, yarn, etc. are varied and opaque. I don't actively develop in php or Node.js, so I had trouble debugging the issues and didn't have time to give them the proper attention, except to conclude that the issues probably had more to do with my particular system than any issues with the Monica codebase.
• I wasn't really using Monica to its full potential. (brthday and anniversary notifications are in my Nextcloud contact entries, so I didn't use Monica for that. Monica ended up being mostly a way for me to log when I last interacted with or saw people, or to try and record trivia/context about people). I ultimately decided that the above issues with keeping the software current and working did not justify the limited use I was making of Monica's extensive features.

With regard to an alternative, I didn't substitute anything for Monica. Even before Monica, I had been using Nextcloud contacts for event notifications (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.), so I've continued that. Without Monica, I'm no longer recording trivia about people or the data on phone calls / recent activities with people.

Despite the above, I do think that Monica solves problems in a useful, and I like the effort of the project. I just prefer self-hosted things for this kind of data, and the effort eventually wasn't justified, given the limited use I was making of Monica.

I'm happy to try and elaborate on this or answer other questions if it'd be helpful.

[meichthys]

Thanks for your thorough reply. I think like you mentioned, most of those issues can be resolved using a doctor compose set up. That would allow a simple one line command to update the Docker image but retain the Monica data. I have no issues with the Docker compose updates, but I have not used Monica significantly yet since it requires a separate contact address book separate from nextcloud where I also keep my primary address book. In my view I like to keep as much data as possible in Nextcloud and have other services reach in and grab that data if needed. It's just a preference of mine that often gets in the way when other services do not support nextcloud integration's, but I find it a worthwhile trade off when I can keep my data in a single data repository like Nextcloud.

I will definitely start using Monica much more once the nextcloud integration is finished👍

[meichthys]

To follow up on this, it looks like the subscription to remote CalDav resources does work via the cli now using:
php artisan monica:newaddressbooksubscription --email [email protected]

The subscription is successful but the subscribed address book contacts don't show up in the web interface. I believe the front-end hasn't yet been updated to support the calDav client contacts.

@asbiin Can you confirm this is the case? If so, @privong we will need to wait for #5520, #5521, #5522, #5523 to be completed before this issue can be closed.