What do you consider to be your master calendar? Your PDA or your desktop calendar? For many of us, the answer is clearly our PDA (or phone). It is always with us and the most likely thing to be updated first. But, for many of us this rule more a 95/5 rule rather than a 100/0 rule. If you use a Windows Mobile Smartphone or Pocket PC, watch out for this gotcha…
I sometimes create an event using Microsoft Outlook on my desktop. This usually happens for an event with a lot of information that I’m copying and pasting from email or a vCal file. Sounds reasonable, right? But, what do you think happened in the following situation?
- I created an appointment for the next day in Outlook on my desktop
- I synced my Windows Mobile Smartphone with the desktop
- The appointment is now on the Smartphone
- Early the next morning I was told that the meeting was postponed until tomorrow
- I changed the date for the event to the next day and checked to make sure the change was visible on the Smartphone
- The Smartphone was then synced to the same desktop with Outlook again.
What do you think happened? If you guessed that the desktop Outlook appointment setting took precedent over my Smartphone and changed the event on the Smartphone back to the now wrong day, you guessed correctly. Try this yourself. I can reproduce this on various generations of Windows Mobile devices.
The moral is that you might think that your Pocket PC or Smartphone is your master calendar. But, ActiveSync has other ideas. Changes made to a calendar appointment on a Windows Mobile device only sticks after ActiveSync if the event was originally created on the device. It unsticks and reverts to the original date/time if the event was created using Outlook. Yuck.
Comments
6 responses to “Windows Mobile Calendar Events That Don’t Stick”
Karin,
I have the same problem with recurring meetings on my AT&T Tilt. Changes to individual occurrences of a recurring meeting are never reflected on the Tilt and most of the time are changed back on my PC. This is annoying and has caused major problems in my work. Does anyone know if Microsoft is working on this problem?
i am having what i think is a similar problem.
sample situation:
1. on MONDAY meeting (usually a recurring mtg) scheduled on desktop for THURSDAY.
2. meeting properly syncs with Samsung Blackjack II.
3. then meeting is rescheduled for WEDNESDAY.
4. on WEDNESDAY, meeting moves back to THURSDAY on desktop (incorrect, it’s really still on WEDNESDAY)
6. then, i miss the dang meeting, because my outlook desktop calendar (my main source) says its on THURSDAY (original time), when it was really rescheduled for WEDNESDAY.
I had a similar problem in that after a sync the desktop takes precedence even when you set it not to and it deleted all my future appointments in my PDA active sync is the problem because I tried using birdie sync and still had the same problem.
Help!!
I have absolutely the same problem. it sucks. have you found any solution that mobile device center works like activesync?
I tested this theory and with ActiveSync 4.5 (latest version I could find) I cannot recreate this problem. I created appointments on both Outlook, my phone, changed both, moved them around and it kept the latest version of every change despite its source.
I didn’t try changing appointments on both the handheld and Outlook simultaneously as this would probably defeat the purpose..
It is possible I mis-understood the problem so ignore the post if i’m off topic.
Cheers!
Do you have Activesync configured so that Outlook (PC) has precedent? You can specify which item wins if they both change.