So this morning I forgot my laptop – my excuse is that it’s normally at the office anyway on a Tuesday – but anyway, since I usually run my e-mail on the laptop, the PDA usually syncs with that. No problem I thought, I have ActiveSync and Outlook on my main desktop machine too, so I just plugged the cradle into that. Bad move all round. Although the PDA is the same, the Exchange server on the back is the same, and there weren’t any appointment changes to make, ActiveSync managed to duplicate a random selection of about 400 appointments. It is it unreasonable to expect a calendar application that can cope with syncing?
Category Archives: Calendar/Contact Syncing
Posts related to trying to get my PDA, phone and Mac to all have the same calendar information.
How Difficult Can It Be?
As you may well know, Office 2007 and Vista will shortly be available to businesses. Thanks to the Microsoft Developers Network, at work we’ve had copies since last week.
Whilst I was away in the USA, two of the other developers on my team parallel installed Office 2007 – although Vista is still limited to non-production machines. Feeling slightly left out, I thought I’d take a look at the new version of Office.
Having said that, I didn’t get far before I hit a snag, my version of ActiveSync. Until now I’ve been quite happily working with version 3.8. Although it was updated to version 4 – indeed I have a copy of version 4 on a machine here, it didn’t give any particular benefit going through the hassle of upgrading. However, looking through the requirements for Office 2007, it needed ActiveSync version 4.
So I went and grabbed the install of the latest version, and set it going. Aside from changing ActiveSync, nothing else was being changed at this point – same version of Outlook on the desktop, same PocketPC with Windows Mobile 2003 SE. The install detected that I was upgrading, no problem I thought…
Seems that it isn’t only MarkSpace that has trouble with synchronising. By the end of the process it had managed to duplicate over 400 entries in my diary, and created a stack of duplicate phone numbers in the contacts. If a system using Microsoft software throughout the process doesn’t work with just upgrading one element, I’m not surprised that third-party solutions struggle. Really, how difficult can it be to get a PDA/Desktop combination that works?
Anyway, based on that experience, plus the somewhat negative feedback from my colleagues about how the new Office interface, whilst being faster with a mouse is a pain to drive with the keyboard, I suspect I’ll be sticking with Office 2003 for the moment, despite some tempting new features. Thankfully using the compatibility tools I can read documents from the new suite as needed.
Travelling with a Computer
Over the past couple of weeks, life for the business traveller has got rather more difficult. Immediately following the major security alert ten days ago, everything including the precious laptops were being checked. Whilst bag thefts have gone up as a result, there is no details of how many laptops have not made it out the other end in one piece.
However things improved a bit with the new regulations. Laptops no longer have to be checked, but the restriction is to a single bag, that dimension wise is about the same as a small laptop. If your laptop is small enough, you can now carry it, but you won’t be able to carry much else.
This of course provoked a good deal of discussion as to what might happen in the longer term. There is evidence that more business travellers are turning to private jets. However for the majority of people who will have to use regular planes, people will have to find ways to reduce what they carry. Certainly I can see smaller laptops becoming more popular for example the Flybook, with maybe a place for the Ultra-mobile PC. However the discussion left me thinking that what you really need is something that is portable, but can cope with being chucked in the hold if the alert level is raised again at short notice. If the baggage handlers are going to fling your suitcase around, even with a solid case rather than the more common soft sided laptop bags, a hard drive is still going to be shocked and jarred around. So effectively you need something solid state.
This led me back to thinking about my Psion 5mx (and I’m not alone), that I replaced with a Dell Axim a while back, and it’s bigger brother, the Series 7 and netBook. Although Psion stopped producing most of the machines a number of years ago, they are still pretty popular in some circles, with machines changing hands for reasonable amounts of money on eBay, and a number of mainstream companies still selling the machines. Indeed in amongst the latest toys, Expansys will still sell you an apparently new netBook. The netBook is sub-laptop size, comes with word processing, spreadsheet, diary, e-mail, basically plenty to keep someone productive whilst travelling. It even has wireless support so it can hook up to a local hotspot whilst travelling. But the key advantage is it is solid state, so nothing fragile to get broken. Of course it’s not a new suggestion – I commented on an article proposing using the Series 7 a few months ago, and it’s pretty easy to find happy customers picking up second hand models online for example here and here. There are also people who still carry around a Psion 5mx despite also carrying more recent devices.
Even my little Psion 5mx is a worthwhile option – I’ve certainly used it on planes before. The battery life is fantastic compared to modern PDA’s, and laptops, and although it is small it has a proper keyboard, so I can type documents on it, and then tidy them up on a PC later. Take a look at the picture to see it in comparison to my laptop – which one would you rather carry around?
The simple fact is that modern PDA’s are essentially PC companions. Whilst Psion maintained they were producing PDA’s, the Psion 3 was probably the best PDA they produced – indeed there are people still using them today almost ten years after their heyday, and fifteen years after the first one appeared. The Psion 5 was really too big, and although they tried to redress the balance with the Psion Revo the balance was swinging towards the Palm idea of a PDA, without a keyboard.
In some ways, Psion were aiming slightly differently, and were producing pocket sized personal computers – certainly all the time I used my Psion 5 and 5mx I wasn’t synchronising them with anything else. My Dell spends most of it’s time hooked up to a desktop PC, and working in tandem with Outlook. Although it can play games, browse the internet, read e-mail and so on, it is tedious to actually write even short e-mails on it – I certainly can’t write up documents in the same way as I could on a Psion. Even years after it went out of production, the Psion 5 is still king when it comes to entering data quickly, just take a look at this comparison that lists data entry speeds for the current crop of devices – then scroll down to the speed for the 5mx for the same test…
Anyway, all the talk about the effects of the new regulations inspired me to dig out my trusty old 5mx. The batteries were all dead, but a couple of new Duracells and a standard CR2032 Lithium battery, all of which I could get at the local Tesco rather than a specialist retailer, and it started up fine. The contents of the internal ‘drive’ had gone when the batteries had died, but the add on CF card still contained data. Having put PsiWin onto my PC it also synced my current calendar, contacts and e-mail straight on without problems – even including the notes I have attached to some of the calendar entries. Certainly it seemed just as robust and stable as always. Bear in mind that on the same day I had to reboot the Axim four times after it repeatedly locked up talking to ActiveSync. As I mentioned before, the only thing that is a pain is linking to a mobile phone (no Bluetooth, only line-of-sight infra-red), and no networking. If someone would produce an updated 5mx with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi it would be great. However the current owners of the platform are focusing on phones, and whilst it may be exactly what most people lugging laptops onto aircraft actually need, the commercial wisdom is that nobody wants a pocket sized computer.
More Calendar Stuff
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.
Why is Syncing Calendars Still Unreliable?
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?