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Cross mobile platform exchange syncing with repeating events.

Back in the old days I used to sync a nokia 9500 and a Sony Ericsson P900 with outlook over a cable. I was pretty confident in that it worked and all appointments and events including repeats where duplicated correctly on each phone. It wasn't until my permanent move to linux that I needed to find a cross platform solution that didn't rely on a PC.

I had always used exchange and had found the S60 and windows mobile exchange syncing to be fine but there could be issues with duplicates or missing entries. I would then spend valuable time tweaking them until they appeared on both devices correctly.

Recently I have expanded the syncing to an android based HTC Hero, Maemo n900 and WEBOS Palm Pre. I have always sought to have a devicer with exchange syncing.

Today on looking in my n900 calendar a recurring birthday hadn't synced. I tried a full resync then extended my search to my other devices to see which one it appeared on. My E63 and Palm Pre synced the event fine bit both the hero and n900 hadn't. Further investigation on the E63 revealed the repeating annual event was started in 1994.
Now whilst you may argue just delete and recreate the event I was determined to get to the root of the issue.

The reason for starting in 1994 was because my old Psion 5 allowed me to create a start date for events and as such would advise me how old the event was. Hence I could work out some one's age. The P900 also allowed me to do this.

It would appear that both the hero and n900 exchange sync cannot cope with this. On changing the repeating start date to 2009 the event synced on all devices. I tried this also with an event from 2003 where I had an issue and again changing this to 2009 allowed it to sync across all devices.

Whilst birthday functionality has now moved from calendar back into contats it is amazing how something so little can cause an issue. It shows how mature both the webos and s60 exchange is compared to the newer platforms. Lastly it also proves that all exchange solutions are not 100%


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