Personal calendar stopped syncing completely to exchange - HELP!

[Matthew Scholz]

Dear MS MVPs,

I've got a puzzle for you! We run Exchange 2003 SP2 with the latest patches
and have 20 or so Macs running Entourage 11.2.4 & 11.2.5.

We have workgroups that have secretaries who have access to all the members'
personal calendars and manage their appointments.

A couple weeks ago, one workgroup member complained that his calendar wasn't
updating. The secretary who had access to his calendar could see lots of
appointments that he couldn't. When I logged in as him to OWA some of the
appointments were missing. So I assumed the problem was with the secretary's
computer.

I tried telling it to synchronize with the server and it said it did. There
were never any errors but some appointments mysteriously didn't sync.

I tried moving all this guy's appointments from the Exchange server to the
secretary's personal LOCAL folder. They all copied fine (about 150
appointments). I then deleted all the appointments from the exchange server.
Once I verified all the appointments had been deleted from the server and
that the guy's computer had synced with the server and showed no
appointments, I copied all the appointments from the secretary's local
folder back into the guy's personal calendar on the exchange server.

The secretary's computer showed all had copied back successfully, and synced
the the server. The guy's computer however showed some were missing. It
turns out that only 130 appointments made it to the server. The secretary
shows 150 are on the server.

I tried completely deleting the exchange account on both machines and going
through the process again. No matter what I do I can't get a new appointment
on the secretary's computer to sync to the server. And I can only get 130 of
the 150 old ones to. The most maddening thing is there is no error of any
kind.

I tried upgrading these two machines to 11.2.5 but it seems to have no
effect.

Can anyone help? Do you have any ideas at all? Anyone heard of anything like
this?


Thanks
- Matt

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

A couple weeks ago, one workgroup member complained that his calendar wasn't
updating. The secretary who had access to his calendar could see lots of
appointments that he couldn't. When I logged in as him to OWA some of the
appointments were missing. So I assumed the problem was with the secretary's
computer.

Yep. OWA reflects what's on the server. Apparently they are not on the
server.

I tried telling it to synchronize with the server and it said it did. There
were never any errors but some appointments mysteriously didn't sync.

I tried moving all this guy's appointments from the Exchange server to the
secretary's personal LOCAL folder. They all copied fine (about 150
appointments). I then deleted all the appointments from the exchange server.
Once I verified all the appointments had been deleted from the server and
that the guy's computer had synced with the server and showed no
appointments, I copied all the appointments from the secretary's local
folder back into the guy's personal calendar on the exchange server.

The secretary's computer showed all had copied back successfully, and synced
the the server. The guy's computer however showed some were missing. It
turns out that only 130 appointments made it to the server. The secretary
shows 150 are on the server.

Anything special about the 20 that didn't make it??

At this point, the only thing I could think of would be to do some port
sniffing (hoping that your connection to the server is not encrypted) to
see what the communication with the server says for the entries that
won;t sync.

There is still the possibility that it is a problem on the server side.
I know Exchange servers have tools to repair and analyze accounts....
You could also try to connect using Outlook 2001 (which uses MAPI) to
see whether the entries show up this way (meaning: they are indeed on
the server - the server refuses to get them through OWA for some
reason).


Corentin