Entourage archives don't carry over category information?????

[bdemoss]

Because the newly-posted 11.2.5 update supposedly gets rid of the known
time zone bug, and because of a large number of duplicate events
created in iCal, I thought it would be a good idea to flush the iCal
calendar out and let Entourage re-populate it from scratch through sync
services after

Boy, was I wrong!!!! Imagine my horror as Entourage automatically
deleted every single calendar event before my eyes.

No problem, I thought. Before beginning the operation, I saved an
Entourage archive to my hard drive, so all I should have been required
to do was import the archive, and the calendar would have been restored
to its original state.

WRONG AGAIN!!!! Apparently, one piece of data that was not restored
was which categories applied to which calendar items. The calendar was
color-coded by category, but I was once again horrified when the
imported calendar items were now a generic black. To get my
color-coding back, I now have to manually go through thousands of them
and set their categories again.

Nice going, Microsoft! Way to think of everything possible before
releasing software! How long have you had to work on Office 2004, and
you didn't think of this?!?!?

Is there any miracle out there that can restore my archived calendar
items AND their categories?

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

WRONG AGAIN!!!! Apparently, one piece of data that was not restored
was which categories applied to which calendar items. The calendar was
color-coded by category, but I was once again horrified when the
imported calendar items were now a generic black. To get my
color-coding back, I now have to manually go through thousands of them
and set their categories again.

Yeah, a real pain. SImilar problem with Exchange in Entourage actually.
To workaround this issue I'm using a script to store categories in one
of the custom fileds in the contacts (and another one to restore that).
http://www.cortig.net/wordpress/?p=73


Barry has a much more elegant solution for events:
http://homepage.mac.com/barryw/scripts/scripts.html

He stores the information in the Note field and another script restores
it as well (I should probably study his script and adapt the same trick
to the script I'm using for contacts).

Custom fields and notes will properly be archived and synched through
Exchange.

Corentin

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Barry has a much more elegant solution for events:
http://homepage.mac.com/barryw/scripts/scripts.html

He stores the information in the Note field and another script restores
it as well (I should probably study his script and adapt the same trick
to the script I'm using for contacts).

I've been playing around with Barry's scripts to adapt them for contacts
as well. It looks like I have something running rather well on my Mac.
More later
The huge advantage is that the Note field syncs through SyncServices as
well and the categories are therefore visible in the System Address Book

I could then have yet another script to re-affect categories in the AB
as well or simply use the search tool to look for my different
categories and move the contacts in the related categories in the app (I
don't have so many categories after all...).



Corentin

 

[Jeff Zienowicz]

I've been playing around with Barry's scripts to adapt them for contacts
as well. It looks like I have something running rather well on my Mac.
More later

I started a thread some time ago, when I was trying to do this with contacts
in a public folder. I wasn't able to write a script that would work with a
public folder, in spite of some good input from this group. But even if it
works only for your own address book, it will be a Very Good Thing.

Jeff