Kerry:
I appreciate the explanation. My apologies. As with many folks, I
don't visit a group such as this unless I'm in trouble. Then, when I
sign in, I find that there are a million postings because I haven't
been monitoring it.
In my prefs for Entourage Sync, I usually have only two boxes checked.
Contacts and Events. I don't have Notes checked. Now this is to Sync
with Mobile Me. Are you saying I should do one at a time?
I hate having to go through "Address Book" and iCal but I find that
Entourage has other attributes that I prefer over either one of the
Apple apps.
Diane: Thank you also for your understanding.
Cheers,
Bruce
I think Diane answered this comment appropriately. In terms of my
needing to chill you've obviously interpreted my comment as a personal
criticism. It wasn't meant to be that at all. It was a general comment
as I am hoping all participants would do some fundamental research
first so that we are not constantly deluged with the same questions we
have been dealing with for two years and to which I have religiously
responded and have helped people for two years. All the dups and the
mess you put up with for so long and had to come up with your own fix
was so unnecessary. Once you noticed this behaviour if you had scanned
the forum you would have found your answer and saved yourself a ton of
pain. ]
I am hoping for others that this would be the case going forward.
People do not need to unnecessarily suffer with this sync mess in
Entourage and otherr packages like Contactizer Pro if they research a
problem in this or other forums especially with an issue like this
that is so heavily documented. I think it is still rated in the top 5
at Mactopia.
I might need to chill for other reasons personal to me but not for
this. This was not a personal attack but simply almost a plea for
people to do some fundamental research. I've watched for two years
people suffer extensively with sync messes and have answered their
queries I can't tell you how many times. A viable workaround which is
100% reliable was arrived at in March 2008 and yet I am still
answering questions like why do I have dups. Its because you have more
than one of Entourage's sync modules turned on at the same time. Work
with only one module turned on at a time and no sync issues with
Entourage period.
I can tell you with Contactizer Pro there is no workaround. A sync
mess there is irreversible and requires a complete uninstall and re-
install. Check out Objective Decisions forum.
Bruce yes your problem and the reason for the dups is you have two
boxes checked in Entourage sync preferences. You can only sync with
one box turned on at a time. In my case, Cal and tasks are always on.
If I make a change to my Contacts I turn of Calendar and Tasks and
turn on Addressbook to sync it. Once done, I switch back to Cal and
Tasks. This works reliably 100% and there will not be sync errors. If
in your switch you accidentally leave the two turned on, you will then
have a sync mess which you will have to recover from. It is a pain
that we cannot have all the modules turned on as we should be able to
but we can't. Microsoft has no intention of fixing this and a long
time ago it became apparent to me they didn't know how to. Objective
Decisions is more direct about the issue than Microsoft. They simply
blame it on Apple's sync services architecture as flaky, unreliable,
buggy etc. If you check out that forum the product manager Aure is
very direct in his comments regarding sync services and how it has
affected their company and the resources they've had to apply to this
problem. I tried that product to see if I could get away from
Entourage but it was way worse. A failure of sync in Contactizer Pro
requires a complete uninstall including all hidden files and a re-
install. However, in doing this you loose all your categories and
links. In essence, what you have is just a fancy iCal and Addressbook
so its just better to use iCal and Addressbook. BTW, if you don't need
the functionality of Entourage I always suggest to people to just use
iCal and Addressbook as there are rarely sync issues unlike what you
can experience with Entourage. Many people in the early days switched
to iCal and Addressbook as they couldn't take the sync problems. For
me, I need the functionality of Entourage but did try at one point to
function in iCal and Addressbook. There aren't sync issues it just
lacked the functionality I need for my work.
So, just to summarize, only have one sync module ticked at any one
time and your sync's will be 100% reliable. I've been working for at
least 6 months now without a sync error and I also sync to an iphone
and a Palm TX and nothing ever goes wrong. Not though if two modules
were turned on.
