Why is Entourage and my BlackBerry working fine?

[John]

I had many issues with both PocketMac and Missing Sync under Mac OSX
Tiger. But ever sinc I upgraded to Snow Leopard and switched to the RIM
BB Sync app I have had ZERO, yes ZERO issues. Notes, contacts, tasks,
and the calendar have been synced many times without hassles. Perhaps
after I send this email my BB or MS Entourage will take a crap on me,
and I will have an issue. But I just don't understand why everything is
suddenly know working.

I am not complaining and am quite happy. But it does not make sense,
after all the boxing matches I had with Missing Sync and PocketMac.


John

 

[doublePlusPaleo]

I had many issues with both PocketMac and Missing Sync under Mac OSX
Tiger. But ever sinc I upgraded to Snow Leopard and switched to the RIM
BB Sync app I have had ZERO, yes ZERO issues. Notes, contacts, tasks,
and the calendar have been synced many times without hassles. Perhaps
after I send this email my BB or MS Entourage will take a crap on me,
and I will have an issue. But I just don't understand why everything is
suddenly know working.

I am not complaining and am quite happy. But it does not make sense,
after all the boxing matches I had with Missing Sync and PocketMac.


John

The Baby Jesus was becoming concerned that his Second Life connection
was getting trashed by lots of dumb questions, so he doth smiled upon
thou machine and smote the evil synchronising devils with a RAM stick.

 

[Kerry]

I had many issues with both PocketMac and Missing Sync under Mac OSX
Tiger. But ever sinc I upgraded to Snow Leopard and switched to the RIM
BB Sync app I have had ZERO, yes ZERO issues. Notes, contacts, tasks,
and the calendar have been synced many times without hassles. Perhaps
after I send this email my BB or MS Entourage will take a crap on me,
and I will have an issue. But I just don't understand why everything is
suddenly know working.

I am not complaining and am quite happy. But it does not make sense,
after all the boxing matches I had with Missing Sync and PocketMac.


John
--
Are there errors in the Bible? How should a church
conduct its worship services? Is drinking Alcohol a sin? Is racism wrong?
If you want to learn, get answers, and be able to defend
the faith, CERM is your place. http://www.cerm.info

The BlackBerry Desktop Manager was a massive improvement for us
BlackBerry users. Secondly, its my subjective impression that sync is
more robust under Snow Leopard but like I said this is a subjective
impression. Can I ask in Entourage are you just running with one sync
module engaged or more than one or say all three???

 

[John]

The BlackBerry Desktop Manager was a massive improvement for us
BlackBerry users. Secondly, its my subjective impression that sync is
more robust under Snow Leopard but like I said this is a subjective
impression. Can I ask in Entourage are you just running with one sync
module engaged or more than one or say all three???

I am using all three syncs and the BB DM works fine and without hassle.

 

[Kerry]

I am using all three syncs and the BB DM works fine and without hassle.
--
Are there errors in the Bible? How should a church
conduct its worship services? Is drinking Alcohol a sin? Is racism wrong?
If you want to learn, get answers, and be able to defend
the faith, CERM is your place.http://www.cerm.info

Interesting. I haven't tested with more than one module running at a
time for a while as running with one module was the only way to ensure
sync's were reliable. This has nothing to do with sync software such
as Missing Sync or the Blackberry Desktop manager. Possibly they have
improved things in Snow Leopard.

I'll run a test with more than one module sync'g to see if it still
causes sync messes. I'm kind of curious. If it doesn't it is Apple
that has fixed this not Microsoft. However, I see posts all the time
with people running more than one module and they end up with sync
messes such as dups which leads me to suspect its not been rectified.
I know Microsoft for a fact has not and will not be fixing the problem.

 

[Kerry]

Interesting. I haven't tested with more than one module running at a
time for a while as running with one module was the only way to ensure
sync's were reliable. This has nothing to do with sync software such
as Missing Sync or the Blackberry Desktop manager. Possibly they have
improved things in Snow Leopard.

I'll run a test with more than one module sync'g to see if it still
causes sync messes. I'm kind of curious. If it doesn't it is Apple
that has fixed this not Microsoft. However, I see posts all the time
with people running more than one module and they end up with sync
messes such as dups which leads me to suspect its not been rectified.
I know Microsoft for a fact has not and will not be fixing the problem.

I ran a couple of my standard tests with more than one module engaged
and for sure it still doesn't work. As soon as I engaged just one
module only everything works 100%.

No change in behaviour since release date Jan 15 2008.

 

[John]

I'll run a test with more than one module sync'g to see if it still
causes sync messes. I'm kind of curious. If it doesn't it is Apple
that has fixed this not Microsoft. However, I see posts all the time
with people running more than one module and they end up with sync
messes such as dups which leads me to suspect its not been rectified.
I know Microsoft for a fact has not and will not be fixing the problem.

I used to have that problem on Tiger. But have not since upgrading to
RIM. Strange it is, is it not?

 

[Kerry]

I used to have that problem on Tiger. But have not since upgrading to
RIM. Strange it is, is it not?
--
Are there errors in the Bible? How should a church
conduct its worship services? Is drinking Alcohol a sin? Is racism wrong?
If you want to learn, get answers, and be able to defend
the faith, CERM is your place.http://www.cerm.info

Try something. Make a change to an existing calendar item on your BB
and sync it back. With more that two modules running this usually
syncs back so that now you have a dup. The original and then a new one
that is identical except it has the changes. At this point you then
need to delete the original. That was one of my tests. The second test
was creating a new task on the handheld and sync'g it to the desktop.
The item would sync to iCal but does not sync over to the desktop. The
third test has to do with all day events such as a birthday. What
generally happens is that an all day event will dup on each sync with
more than one module running. So if you're not paying attention
eventually you'll have quite a few occurrences of all day events. This
last one is a little more unpredictable. Since these tests produced
these results immediately for me when i engaged two modules I'm
assuming the other bizarre behaviors that eventually happen would
materialize.

 

[John]

Try something. Make a change to an existing calendar item on your BB
and sync it back. With more that two modules running this usually
syncs back so that now you have a dup.

Not on mine. Made a change and passed with flying colors. No dups at
all. Yes I had dups when I was running Tiger and PocketMac or Missing
Sync. Are you using Tiger or one of those apps?

The original and then a new one

that is identical except it has the changes. At this point you then
need to delete the original. That was one of my tests. The second test
was creating a new task on the handheld and sync'g it to the desktop.
The item would sync to iCal but does not sync over to the desktop.

On mine it synced back to the desktop and no dups. Again flying colors.


However I did note that iCal there were problems. The task did not sync,
and neither was the calendar item modified. However since I use
Entourage all worked well. I have all three sync services modules
checked, but Entourage does not rely on iCal and I do not use iCal.
Missing Sync lived on iCal and sync services and perhaps this was one of
its issues.



John

The

 

[Kerry]

The following is from emails John and I have exchanged with each other
but I thought it should be in the forum. If anyone has anything to
add, that would be great as we're getting different results:

John, I use the iPhone now but both my BB and it use sync services and
so
does the RIM desktop. If the task didn't sync to iCal I'm not sure how
it
got into Entourage. I used the RIM desktop for at least 2 months
before
going to the iPhone and I know it uses sync services the same as
Missing
Sync. PocketMac was the different one. It writes directly to and from
Entourage bypassing sync services

In terms of your not getting a dup in Entourage in Calendar I can
probably,
for a short while, create that scenario on my Mac by resetting sync
services
and re-establishing sync to Entourage (in fact, I know I can as at
times I'd
get hopeful). However, it would never last. Eventually, strange sync
behaviors would happen. During the course of use and I'd never know
when
this would happen, all day events like birthdays would begin to keep
dup'g.
I'd never notice this until my calendar came up to someone's birthday.
Then,
I'd do a scan of my calendar and sure enough the other birthdays would
have
dups.

Everyone experiences this and Microsoft tech support (I don't know
about now
as I think a lot of people just gave up) knows about it.

The other thing is we should probably be posting in the forum so
people can
see this flow and exchange of info. Maybe someone else can chime in
with
their experience I just know up till today from Jan 21 2008 when I
bought
Entourage I've been helping people with this problem. I discovered the
workaround at about the same time as Markspace and they also know
there is
no resolution and will be no fix from Microsoft. Microsoft is blaming
Apple
but so too is Objective Decisions.

I'm going to paste this into our forum discussion.

Kerry




Try something. Make a change to an existing calendar item on your BB
and sync it back. With more that two modules running this usually
syncs back so that now you have a dup.

Not on mine. Made a change and passed with flying colors. No dups at
all. Yes I had dups when I was running Tiger and PocketMac or Missing
Sync. Are you using Tiger or one of those apps?

The original and then a new one
that is identical except it has the changes. At this point you then
need to delete the original. That was one of my tests. The second test
was creating a new task on the handheld and sync'g it to the desktop.
The item would sync to iCal but does not sync over to the desktop.

On mine it synced back to the desktop and no dups. Again flying
colors.


However I did note that iCal there were problems. The task did not
sync,
and neither was the calendar item modified. However since I use
Entourage all worked well. I have all three sync services modules
checked, but Entourage does not rely on iCal and I do not use iCal.
Missing Sync lived on iCal and sync services and perhaps this was one
of
its issues.



John

The
third test has to do with all day events such as a birthday. What
generally happens is that an all day event will dup on each sync with
more than one module running. So if you're not paying attention
eventually you'll have quite a few occurrences of all day events. This
last one is a little more unpredictable. Since these tests produced
these results immediately for me when i engaged two modules I'm
assuming the other bizarre behaviors that eventually happen would
materialize.

 

[Kerry]

The following is from emails John and I have exchanged with each other
but I thought it should be in the forum. If anyone has anything to
add, that would be great as we're getting different results:

John, I use the iPhone now but both my BB and it use sync services and
so
does the RIM desktop. If the task didn't sync to iCal I'm not sure how
it
got into Entourage. I used the RIM desktop for at least 2 months
before
going to the iPhone and I know it uses sync services the same as
Missing
Sync. PocketMac was the different one. It writes directly to and from
Entourage bypassing sync services

In terms of your not getting a dup in Entourage in Calendar I can
probably,
for a short while, create that scenario on my Mac by resetting sync
services
and re-establishing sync to Entourage (in fact, I know I can as at
times I'd
get hopeful). However, it would never last. Eventually, strange sync
behaviors would happen. During the course of use and I'd never know
when
this would happen, all day events like birthdays would begin to keep
dup'g.
I'd never notice this until my calendar came up to someone's birthday.
Then,
I'd do a scan of my calendar and sure enough the other birthdays would
have
dups.

Everyone experiences this and Microsoft tech support (I don't know
about now
as I think a lot of people just gave up) knows about it.

The other thing is we should probably be posting in the forum so
people can
see this flow and exchange of info. Maybe someone else can chime in
with
their experience I just know up till today from Jan 21 2008 when I
bought
Entourage I've been helping people with this problem. I discovered the
workaround at about the same time as Markspace and they also know
there is
no resolution and will be no fix from Microsoft. Microsoft is blaming
Apple
but so too is Objective Decisions.

I'm going to paste this into our forum discussion.

Kerry




Try something. Make a change to an existing calendar item on your BB
and sync it back. With more that two modules running this usually
syncs back so that now you have a dup.

Not on mine. Made a change and passed with flying colors. No dups at
all. Yes I had dups when I was running Tiger and PocketMac or Missing
Sync. Are you using Tiger or one of those apps?

The original and then a new one
that is identical except it has the changes. At this point you then
need to delete the original. That was one of my tests. The second test
was creating a new task on the handheld and sync'g it to the desktop.
The item would sync to iCal but does not sync over to the desktop.

On mine it synced back to the desktop and no dups. Again flying
colors.

However I did note that iCal there were problems. The task did not
sync,
and neither was the calendar item modified. However since I use
Entourage all worked well. I have all three sync services modules
checked, but Entourage does not rely on iCal and I do not use iCal.
Missing Sync lived on iCal and sync services and perhaps this was one
of
its issues.

John

The
third test has to do with all day events such as a birthday. What
generally happens is that an all day event will dup on each sync with
more than one module running. So if you're not paying attention
eventually you'll have quite a few occurrences of all day events. This
last one is a little more unpredictable. Since these tests produced
these results immediately for me when i engaged two modules I'm
assuming the other bizarre behaviors that eventually happen would
materialize.

I think I figured this out. John sent me some screen shots and I asked
are you using 2004 and he said yes. I think that's why his system
works and mine won't as I use 2008. I told him when 2008, due to
issues primarily around sync, many people reverted to 2004, some went
to the Apple apps, others to Outlook under say Parallels and some of
us brave souls stuck with Entourage using the one module sync at a
time workaround approach.

John's reply to me I'm glad I stayed with 2004. I was just assuming he
was using 2008 and could not figure out why his system would work and
mine wouldn't as I know the Blackberry DTM uses sync services. Its
important to know what version of Entourage one's using as too many
things make a difference in this whole sync serv mess.