Blog Archives

I am very excited about the release today of Daylite v3.10. As a Daylite Partner who installs and supports Daylite for many, many clients, I have learned where Daylite shines, and where it doesn’t. I love the product, but like any software, it has some areas that are not so polished. One of the pain points for current users of Daylite has been the online/offline sync system.

For those of you not aware of what this is, here it is in a nutshell. When users work with Daylite on a LAN, there is a server, and client copies of Daylite connect to that server to access the database. But because that data is so rich, detailed, and plain old LARGE, there had to be a way to access that while away from the office without trying to link to that database over intermittent and sometimes slow internet connections. As opposed to trying to build some web-based implementation, Marketcircle crafted an “offline” mode. When a user would get ready to leave their office LAN for the day, or for travel, and wanted to have their Daylite info go with them, they would choose a menu items to take their login of Daylite into “offline” mode. A local copy of pretty much the entire database would be created onto their Mac, and then they could have access to that data regardless of whether or not they had an internet connection. This was great for working on a plane, a bus, or anywhere that WiFi access was poor or spotty. Once there was an internet connection, the user could sync their offline with the live online database, and all changes, the ones they’d made on their offline, and the ones other users had been making to the main database, would sync.

This was a good solution that worked for most users, but could be problematic. If the database was large, with many thousands of contacts, and many users were making a lot of changes, those offline syncs could potentially take a long time. And if one of those long syncs was interrupted, with a bad or slow wifi connection in an airport, for example, there was a risk that data could get corrupted. Or, that the user’s offline database would be sort of half synced, and then not function. Users might then wait for another oportunity to sync again, at which point the changes needed to sync would be larger, and require a longer sync.

Marketcircle has been very aware of the weakness of their sync in regards to this scenario, and have been working diligently to solve it. With the release of Daylite 3.10, they have. I have been participating in the Daylite 3.10 beta testing program for several weeks now, and couldn’t be more thrilled at the change. The big difference is that Daylite will perform constant, regular tiny background “whisper” syncs every 5 minutes. In addition to making their sync consistency checks more robust, the automatic syncs work so well, that users can now just go offline, and forget about it. Their data gets updated within a few minutes, and the other users users their changes as well.

It seems like a simple and obvious thing when described this way, but with all software development, the devil is in the details. Getting this to work so well and so smoothly was a lot of work, and finally the online/offline system is working in the way Marketcircle had always hoped it would. I really appreciate them targeting issues like this that are important from end user’s point of view, and making Daylite even more pleasant to use.

For more details you can read the full release notes here.