So after a couple of weeks working with the current arrangement for keeping all my calendars in sync, how is it working? There are still occasional synchronisation goofs, particularly the problem with timezones when all-day appointments come through from Entourage onto the Exchange server that I mentioned in my previous posting. There are also periodic problems with contacts, usually getting duplicated. The other odd problem is that periodically the PDA and ActiveSync seem to suffer from amnesia, announces that this device has not been synced before, and do a new sync. That in turn generates a stack of duplicate appointments that then get deleted. As the current set-up is somewhat on the complicated side, I thought I’d put together a diagram of where my calendar currently goes in order to get it everywhere I need, which you can see here. You can click on the image to see a bigger version.

Whilst on the subject of calendars, and my previous grumble about how difficult it was to synchronise them, I recently came across a great blog by Scot Mace, called Calendar Swamp, which focuses on the entire subject area of electronic calendars and their interoperation. His apt analogy is that the world of computer calendars is like a swamp, and alongside that when a new bit of software, or possible solution comes along, he awards points for how well, or otherwise it succeeds in draining the swamp. If you like me are mired in the same swamp trying to keep everything in sync, it is certainly a site to keep an eye on.

Of course, one much anticipated addition to the arena is Google Calendar, with speculation going back more than a year, much of it expecting Google to really shake things up. As of this week, Google Calendar finally arrived, even being reported by the BBC.

I have to say that as a Mac user, aside from the close integration with GMail, and natural language parser (which they are not the first to do – see this comparison of 30 Boxes and Spongecell), the rest of the calendaring was a bit old hat, even down to the look. The similarity to iCal, that ships as part of MacOS X in both operation and functionality is very noticeable – but then they do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! Having said that, the fact that this is essentially a web based version of iCal, even down to sharing the same industry standard file formats is good, as it does provide a well known ready made location to publish shared calendars. Also with Google and a number of other online calendar providers pushing the format, Mozilla basing their calendar on the same format, and even some limited iCal support in Outlook it might make interoperability a bit less of a pain – we live in hope!

As to whether I’m going to be changing from my current solution, I think not. I’ve had a play around with both 30 Boxes, and Google Calendar (see here for a good comparison) but since both are pushing on with online editing features, and I’m looking primarily for a synchronisation solution, they’re not really what I neeed. Having said that both might be good for publishing schedules for Youth Group, Choir, and other groups like that.

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I commented in my previous post that I hadn’t tried the last part of the synchronisation process, and that I would see what happened when I got to work. Unfortunately when I got to work there turned out to be a couple of problems.

Firstly, for some reason on both Outlook on the PC, and on my PDA I ended up with the recurring appointment for the 11am service at St James having been duplicated, although oddly enough the duplicate wasn’t flagged as private. I’m not quite sure where it came from, but this record was also not visible in Entourage, nor in iCal – removing it on the PDA seemed to remove it without a problem.

I also came up with an interesting issue when I added all day appointments in iCal. I put in the summer holiday as a recurring daily appointment – primarily to avoid a previous problem whereby although iCal will quite happily cope with the summer holidays as a single event for the whole period, it wouldn’t sync to the PocketPC which sets a limit of 30 days on the length of an event. Anyway, the recurring event appeared correctly in iCal, and in Entourage, but when it appeared on Outlook, it came up as overlapping 24-hour long appointments starting at 1am. Looking at the record in Outlook it appeared to be a problem with time-zones as the record stated the time as being 12 midnight to 12 midnight in the Mauritania and Casablanca time-zone. I reset the time on the appointments, and this sorted out the problem, although oddly enough it made no change to how it appeared in Entourage.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with Howard over this whole issue. Whilst there are loads of potential pitfalls with calendar synchronisation, particularly with going between iCal and Entourage that have some fundamental differences in the way they handle calendar information, even between Microsoft products there are still problems, as the issues I describe above show. However it’s not exactly a new problem, in my first job more than a decade ago we synchronised appointments with a central server, and yet it still has problems. Why is it that after all this time we still can’t reliably sync between electronic calendars? Indeed, why is it that people still put up with these calendar syncing glitches?

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So after a weekend of playing around with Entourage 2004, I’ve now settled on a setup.

Mail wise I’m sticking with Apple Mail. I did try out mail in Entourage but firstly it really annoyed me that unless I used HTML mail – which I tend to avoid in favour of plan text – the mail editor forcibly limited me to 76 characters, and then when I did an import of my pretty large amount of data from Apple Mail, it messed up.

It wasn’t a mess up on quite the scale that Missing Sync managed on Friday – what was imported came in fine, it just managed to miss the majority of my inbox – and double up on some of the rest. Although the ability to link elements together, for instance linking a meeting in the calendar to the attendees, the word documents of the minutes and agenda, and the e-mails was attractive, the interface proved to be a bit tedious, and to be honest I thought I probably wouldn’t use it much anyway. The problems with the import and the editor sort of set the seal on it.

Instead I turned on the new Sync Services support, to sync my Apple Address Book with Entourage, and also show the calendar in iCal. I expected to get a few problems with the Address Book sync, which I did – with various records ending up with duplicates. However Address Book is pretty easy to sort out, particularly with a nice feature to combine records. All those changes were quickly propagated back into Entourage. The iCal support is a bit of a pain, as it side-steps the problems that applications such as Missing Sync tend to have by putting everything from Entourage into a single calendar. Since my categories are not picked up by the Exchange support in Entourage it’s not too much of a problem.

At the end of the line is my phone, which syncs quite happily with the Mac. Ultimately through the purchase of Entourage 2004 I have got to a point where my calendar and contacts are able to all sync together. At the moment it all seems to be working fine, although the final element will be to see quite what happens when I plug the PDA into it’s cradle at work tomorrow morning!

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The parcel I went off to pick up from TNT last night was an upgraded version of Office for Mac. Up until now, I’ve not bothered to upgrade our version of Office X to the latest 2004 version, as I haven’t really seen the need. But as part of the ongoing attempts to get my PDA and the Mac synced, I thought I’d give it a go.

The thing that tempted me to make the upgrade, was that Office 2004 for the Mac can now hook up to an Exchange server, which as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, has been quite happily keeping in sync with my PDA, so whilst Missing Sync to iCal and Address Book has proved to be a dead loss, in a roundabout sort of way I would be able to get my calendar onto the Mac.

Firstly, a bit of background. Whilst both the Mac and PC versions of Office contain versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint, the e-mail and calendaring application on the Mac, called Entourage, is not a clone of Outlook. Whilst the general thrust of what the application does is the same, there are a number of differences. One of the big missing features has, until Outlook 2004 came along been an equivalent to the Outlook to Exchange Server connectivity.

That changed with Entourage 2004, indeed the Mac is the only machine I have that is even able to connect to the work Exchange server. Whilst I can run Outlook on my own PC, it cannot connect directly to the Exchange server, as the only access is when connected to the work network over a VPN connection – something which is only available on my work provided laptop. Having said that, if I wanted to access my outlook mail and calendar from another machine across the internet, I could do so using a fairly painful web based interface called Outlook Web Access, or OWA for short. Whilst it does the job in an emergency, it is not the nicest interface to use.

Now Entourage 2004 has a really impressive party piece. When you opt to create a connection to an Exchange server, one of the options it gives you is to fill in a web address for the OWA page, at which point it goes off, and synchronises quite happily using the underlying web interface, something which the PC version of Outlook can’t do at all. For perfectly reasonable security reasons, network administrators don’t want to expose their Exchange servers to the internet – but this totally avoids the problem. It got a glowing report from Howard when I pointed out the feature:

That is possibly the most useful thing I’ve ever seen an MS product do, and I had no idea it was possible. Thanks!

I’ve just sync’d my Microsoft exchange account with Entourage via OWA, and it’s working seamlessly.

Very cool.

Having said that, having tried it out tonight with the server at work, I’d give it 7/10 for effort, but it still doesn’t achieve the whole of what I want. The major problem from my point of view is that the reason it works, is precisely the reason why it can’t do everything. OWA doesn’t show you your categories.

On my calendar on both Outlook and the PocketPC, all the events are categorised, to separate my church appointments from my work appointments. Indeed the church appointments are further subdivided into meetings, social events and choir events. Since OWA doesn’t show your categories, Entourage is unable to retrieve them, and although you can use the categories in Entourage to sort appointments, this is totally separate from the categorisations you have on Exchange, and on the PDA. So for the moment it is a good try, but ultimately until categories come through too, is not really much use.

Anyway, I’ll ponder whether I want to move my e-mail and so forth over into Entourage – since the calendar is not quite what I want it is not urgent, however whilst it isn’t all pretty colours, it may well still be useful. However, one thing I won’t be doing is making any more attempts to try and sync in the other direction, by using Missing Sync to link between Entourage and my PDA.

After the disappointment of the Entourage link not being quite what I wanted, I thought I’d see if the synchronisation with Entourage from Missing Sync was any better than with ICal and Address Book. Effectively I gave them the benefit of the doubt, that the problems with the Apple applications were caused by problems with the Apple Sync services, rather than issues with the software.

With hindsight, I should have gone with my previous experience, and not touched Missing Sync with a barge pole. Luckily I did a complete backup of the PDA before I started, otherwise I would have been in even more of a mess. When I plugged the PDA into Entourage, there shouldn’t have been anything to synchronise. The calendar and contacts in Entourage were fresh from the server at work, and the PDA had been synced with the work server last thing before I came home. However Missing Sync quickly set to work moving regular events around my calendar, duplicating events – for some reason all the lent lecture series was duplicated at 9pm, alongside the correct 8pm version from both the PDA and the server. It even managed to make mothers day extend into the following Monday. Frankly it was appalling, worse than with ICal – and more than that, it wasn’t adding them to my local Entourage, all of these changes where propagating through and updating the server at work! At this point I went straight for the disconnect button and terminated the process, but by that time it was too late.

Thankfully, because I had taken the backup, it was a straightforward, albeit tedious process to sort the mess out. Although neither the work server, nor the Mac had a decent version of the calendar, I did have a backup on the PDA. All I needed to do was restore the correct calendar to the PDA and force Outlook and Exchange to rebuild their calendar from there. It is slightly more of a pain as Outlook only ever gives you two options when it is doing an initial synchronisation – to replace the contents of the PDA with what is on the server, or to merge the two – it is missing the option to rebuild from the PDA. As a result you need to manually clear out the contents of the server calendar, and then remove the partnership from ActiveSync, so effectively the PC and PDA start out from scratch. Considering that I was doing this all over the VPN connection with my work laptop – it was all a bit slow, in fact to get to the point now, where the calendar is all straight on the PDA, the Mac and the work server has taken the best part of three hours.

So the moral of this story is never, ever, ever, let Missing Sync anywhere near your PDA. All in all it’s been a total waste of money, and I’ve taken great pleasure in un-installing it from the Mac tonight. I also don’t think I’ll be going near PocketMac either, as I’ve heard a lot of bad stories about that too. Hopefully in the future the Entourage exchange synchronisation will manage categories, until then, I’m further on than I was – I have a calendar that is visible on the Mac and at work, even if I don’t have all the pretty coloured categories at home.

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I’ve previously reported on my woes with Missing Sync, and it’s general inability to get things right when syncing between my PocketPC and the Mac. This weekend I thought I’d give it one last go, to see if it could manage to get the synchronisation right.

The reason I tried it out this weekend is because I had the laptop from work home. At work we have an Microsoft Exchange server running, and Outlook is the tool of choice, so unlike SSE where the use of Lotus Notes left all our calendars in a nice little private world, here I can plug my PDA into the laptop, and synchronise up pretty easily, allowing me finally to have business appointments in the same place as all the rest.

I started off with a clean calendar in Outlook on the work laptop, and spent a good deal of time with Pocket Informant on my PDA getting categories sorted out, and everything pretty well in order. I then hooked up the PDA, sat back and let it sync away. It synced pretty well, aside from some old recurring appointments starting in 2002, which for some reason Active Sync objected to – these I just deleted.

I then made use of the outlook views to finish of the categories, and also to ensure that my private appointments didn’t end up cluttering up the work server. As far as I could tell, everything had come across correctly.

Encouraged by having synced into Outlook, I then had a go at doing the same onto the Mac. The first thing I did was to clear out everything from iCal, so effectively, all Missing Sync had to do was to make a copy of the PDA, into iCal on the Mac. I’m sorry to report that it couldn’t even manage to get this right.

Whilst it successfully managed to get the normal appointments across, it failed totally to get the recurring appointments correct. It is worth saying that the recurring appointments are doing nothing that iCal itself can’t do – having Matins on the second and fourth Sundays in the month, Evensong on the first Sunday, and the Family Service on the third – but whilst March came out correct, the services were all over the place in the other months, sometimes with the Family service popping up on the Thursday, other times Matins ended up on a Tuesday. Whilst the services were consistent within a particular month, they weren’t consistent over successive months. If the software can’t even manage to just copy a schedule from a PocketPC onto a totally clean copy of iCal, I’m not surprised it makes such a mess of anything more complicated. Frankly it is a total waste of time and effort, and I don’t really think I’m going to be letting it near my PocketPC any time soon.

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After my successful upgrade to Tiger last weekend, the one remaining problem to sort out was getting the new version of Missing Sync working.

Anyway, at the last report I was just about to install it, which I did, backed up everything in iCal and Address Book on the Mac, and backed up the PocketPC, and then tried to sync.

It’s worth saying that I hadn’t been properly using the previous version of Missing Sync which was incompatible with Tiger, as it tended to have problems with one of my subscribed calendars which included attached notes, deciding that the notes had been changed on the PDA and trying to shift them about, so I used it to copy my ‘master’ diary on the Mac onto the PDA. As a result, what I opted to do first, was to blank down the PDA and just make a copy, unfortunately with the new version, even this didn’t work.

It got about a third of the way through the transfer, and then came across an all day event in a subscribed calendar, and produced an error for this and every subsequent event. It is worth noting that this self same event copies across quite happily with the old version.

Anyway, I repeated the process again, and although it processed the events in a different order, when it got to this event, it again started erroring. So I put in a support request, together with copies of the log files.

It took until yesterday for their support to actually reply (apparently they are having a lot of support calls at the moment…), and with just a list of things to try culled from the website, and also the suggestion that my iCal database may be corrupt.

After a bit more fiddling around, I did get a partially successful sync, but only by removing the suspect calendar, however after two further exchanges with support, even cutting and pasting the specific error, however the support person seems to be in a strange parallel universe where they answer a different quesiton to the one I ask, and in one e-mail where I complained that the old version was much better got totally confused and agreed that the new version was better!

The impression I am getting is that although they delayed release of the product and maintain that it has been tested, their testing has probably been only with simple events. Also since the reason for the forced upgrade was because Apple totally changed the synchronisation support between Panther and Tiger, there will be problems, however what is really annoying is that even though I’ve offered to send them the specific calendar that is causing problems, given them details of the error, I’m still getting standard answers, and not really any specific help. At the moment it actually feels like I’m supporting myself, with a little supporters club over the e-mail!

Since the initial release there has been one official update, and two beta’s, and even the latest beta still exhibits the problem. Hopefully by then I’ll be able to get a successful sync, if not, I’ll be like this guy on the Internet, and not syncing at all. As to the other option – apparently Pocket Mac has problems with recurring appointments, which would totally screw up my service calendar – this is alongside a selection of hangs and crashes. Whilst it has problems, at least Missing Sync is stable.

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