Microsoft Office 2004 11.2.3 (#6): More on Sync Services issues

We continue to report on issues concerning Microsoft's implementation of Apple Sync Services compatibility in Microsoft Office 2004 11.2.3.

As explained previously, you can set Entourage to overwrite entries contained in the Sync Services database when first synchronizing. However, doing so may cause problems, as Entourage's information may not translate properly into the Sync Services database.

Incorrect times for all-day events We previously reported an issue where all-day events appear with the wrong time when synchronized to various locations after they are moved from Entourage to the "truth" database (the master database for information accessed by Sync Services-compliant applications).

For many users, after enabling Sync Services in the new Entourage update, duplicated All Day events and All Day events appear at the wrong time on the previous day.

MacFixIt reader Luis Antezana reports that, in his case, the problem was caused by an inexplicable time-zone switch:

"I had this problem last Friday night, as my own All Day events were both duplicated and changed to start at 4:00 a.m. on the previous day. Duplication continued until I had five All Day events, with two of them appearing at the wrong time, for each All Day event on my calendar. No timed events were affected. My database has been with me and behaving fine since Entourage 2001, although I have run maintenance routines to make sure of that.

"The reason for the time weirdness is that somehow the time zone of each All Day event had been changed to Casablanca, Monrovia, while I live in Seattle. The only way to fix this is to either restore from backup or manually touch each All Day event and change its Time Zone (I don?t want to hear it about AppleScript, I am embarrassed already that I hardly use it!). I chose the manual deletion/modification route because I just wanted to get hands-on with each event."

"How this time zone change happened, I do not know, but I do know that I noticed it after making a change in Entourage and checking iCal to see what happened and going back and forth seeing the events get weird in iCal and then Entourage. This is non-scientific observation so not really worth much, but I feel like iCal may handle All Day events differently than Entourage."

Duplication caused by Exchange? One MacFixIt reader speculates that duplication issues may be caused by the presence of simultaneous Exchange synchronization attempts indicating that Exchange and Sync Services do not play well together.

The reader writes:

"As for the duplication, I have a feeling that Exchange accounts may be causing some trouble. There's good background here that gives me reason enough to say that it looks to my non-developer?s eye that Entourage with Sync Services enabled may be doing a Bad Thing if it?s being used on more than one Mac and each has an Exchange account in Entourage and both .Mac and iCal synchronization enabled, because your data should be syncing to only one source, and in this scenario Entourage is syncing to two ? Truth (this is the master database for all info handled by Sync Services) and Exchange, and it looks like there?s some room for error here.

An example flow would be as follows, given a Mac at work and one at home, with Sync Services, iCal, and .Mac enabled on both as under the scenario just mentioned:

1. Change in calendar item in Entourage at work.
2. Change goes from Entourage at work to Exchange Server 2003 at work and to Truth at work.
3. Change goes from Exchange Server 2003 at work to Entourage at home AND change goes from Truth at work to .Mac online to Truth at home.
4. Entourage at home wants to update Truth at home with the data it got from Exchange, while Truth at home wants to sync its new data to Entourage at home. Maybe they each update each other, and this is the source of the duplication."

Previous coverage:

• Microsoft Office 2004 11.2.3 (#5): Entourage database corruption
• Microsoft Office 2004 11.2.3 (#4): More Sync Services issues; Another fix for Spotlight/Entourage
• Microsoft Office 2004 11.2.3 (#3): Problems with Sync Services; Getting Spotlight to work with Entourage
• Microsoft Office 2004 11.2.3 (#2): Security vulnerabilities patched in this release; Spotlight issues; Update will not install; more
• Microsoft releases Office 2004 11.2.3

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