Entourage 2008 - Palm Sync

On 03/21/08 2:01 PM, in article
c8fef5bb-3892-4f09-b968-0ff06fa6319d RemoveThis @h11g2000prf.googlegroups.com, "Kerry"
<kerry.dawson RemoveThis @gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mar 20, 12:05 pm, Jesse David Hollington <j... RemoveThis @hollington.ca>
> wrote:
>> The Sync Services integration in 12.0.0 was *very* badly broken, and 12.0.1
>> seems to have mostly fixed these issues.
>>
>> The few remaining issues that I am having with duplicates seems to be timing
>> related.  Entourage doesn't necessarily sync as quickly with Sync Services
>> as it should, and if you therefore take an external device like a Palm or
>> even an iPhone and sync it in relatively short succession then it's possible
>> for duplicates to appear.  I can reproduce this problem almost consistently
>> at this point.
>>
>> For example, if I change an appointment in my Entourage calendar, and then
>> *immediately* sync my iPhone to it, chances are good that I will end up with
>> a duplicate appointment -- the old (unchanged) appointment from the device
>> gets transferred back in before Entourage has had a chance to properly
>> resync the changes from it's end, and it therefore doesn't recognize a
>> "changed" appointment and creates a duplicate, since the synced timing on
>> the device version gets updated before Entourage has a chance to touch it.
>> On the other hand, if I make a change in Entourage and wait a few minutes
>> before syncing my device, I have no such problems, as Entourage has then had
>> a chance to update the sync services database before anything else touches
>> that record.
>>
>> Obviously Entourage should be handling conflict resolution more effectively,
>> but I suspect they may be erring perhaps a bit too much on the side of
>> caution -- the logic being that a duplicate event is preferable to a lost
>> event...  
>>
> I see you have done a change in Entourage and then sync it across. You
> feel this is a timing issue. I'm assuming you have both addressbook
> and iCal sync'g turned on. Have you tried this in the reverse - a
> change in either iCal or your iPhone and then seeing how the sync goes
> back into Entourage. This is the problem I have if I have Addressbook
> sync'g turned on with iCal. If I change/modify an event in iCal or the
> Palm, it immediately syncs that to Entourage and dups either the task
> or the event. I don't see how timing would change this. Once you
> change iCal or do a sync from, in my case the Palm, it immediately
> sync's to Entourage and the dup appears.

Yes, I have both Address Book and Calendar syncing enabled, with the iPhone
and Address Book/iCal as the only sync clients other than Entourage itself.

*Modifications* made on the iPhone or in iCal to *existing* appointments
seems to be a bit problematic, and I haven't entirely tracked this down as
it's not at all consistent. The problems I have seem to be that the change
sometimes simply doesn't show up *at all* -- the appointment stays as it was
in Entourage originally, and then a subsequent sync overwrites the original
Entourage appointment back into iCal and onto the device.

I still suspect a timing issue, but it may be timing that is beyond the
user's control. Any *new* appointments created in either application come
through fine, however (something that was most definitely broken in the
previous version).

I've played around a bit with Syncrospector to try and diagnose this and
watch when syncs are occurring. Entourage's Sync Services behaviour is
definitely weird, and when I mention that it's a timing issue, I'm not
assuming that it's something the user should really be able to control (or
be *expected* to control anyway :) ).

The fact that in your case turning Address Book syncing off seems to solve
the problem would also tie in to that, since some of the odd behaviour that
Syncrospector is showing seems to indicate that Entourage's syncing of the
address book and calendar entries occur in different cycles, and the
calendar sync seems to get delayed/disabled while the address book sync is
occurring. It's an interesting clue, and I'm going to have to try turning
off address book syncing to see if that helps in any meaningful way.

The Palm conduit of course introduces a separate wrinkle into the process,
as that's yet-another-sync-client, which is going to potentially complicate
things even further by adding another sync into the process.

At this point I've gone so far as to completely reset my entire sync
services engine -- basically erasing the Truth database completely and
starting over with the calendar data in Entourage as authoritative. It
hasn't completely fixed the problem, but it seems to be far less frequent
now, if perhaps for no other reason than the fact that the sync services
Truth database is much smaller than it was before, and therefore takes less
time to mingle changes.
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