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?