Help Please - Recurring appointment issues driving us potty!

[JD2]

Dear Outlook Gurus,

In the last month or so, we have had several users report problems with
recurring appointments that they manage for other staff in Outlook 2003 (eg.
personal assistants looking after manager appointments). These managers also
synchronise their Outlook data to mobile phones.

Problems reported include:
* when updating date/time for one specific date (not the series), some
invitees end up with the appointment in their calendar TWICE (old and new
date)
* appointments disappearing and then reappearing the next day (very strange)
* some invitees having changed appointment in their calendar correctly, but
other invitees still having old appointment date/time in their calendar (even
when they have swore they have accepted updated time)
* instances where Outlook comes up with an error re: being able to open or
change a recurring appointment (this was somewhat fixed by clearing the forms
cache).
* errors appearing re: being able to change a recurring appointment, but
then it sends the update anyway - so invitees are getting multiple copies.

As you can appreciate, we have tried to duplicate the problems but things
seem to be OK when we test it with them. The only thing that has fixed
things slightly has been to clear the forms cache as advised on another post.
Obviously such problems are VERY frustrating for our users. It seems to be
restricted to recurring appointments and for instances where someone else is
looking after another person's calendar on their behalf (and where they are
changing dates/times and required attendees).

Has anyone else experienced or seen one or more of these issues before? Any
ideas on what we can do to resolve any of them?

Any advice would be appreciated ...

Regards
JD2

 

[Roady [MVP]]

How do things work without the synchronizing?
Some sync applications and/or mobile devices are unaware of recurring
appointments and treat it as individual single appointments breaking the
recurrence link. Synching it back, the synching application sees it as a new
appointment and dumps it in Outlook resulting in a duplicate. It could also
overwrite it but of course in either case, updates don't work anymore as it
is a new appointment.

 

[Raj]

Hai JD2,
what I can understand as per problem explanations is that -

appointment can re-occur after you sync with mobile device due to the time difference.
If calendar time doesnot match with your system time
Install Automatic time zone update (support.microsoft.com)
make sure all these above settings matches will computer in network.

The duplication or loss of calendar items across mainly due to these above
reasons

Hope, these above suggestions can be of help

 

[jaw]

I have a very reproducible scenario. Say that I have a recurring appt for 6
weeks - every Monday. If I modify one or two of those (move one maybe to
Wednesday), it moves in Outlook 2003, yet after my mobile device (HTC)
sync's, the one instance of appt that was modifies goes back to the recurring
and there is no record that I modified one occurrence of the appointment.

I cannot tell if the scenario listed at the beginning matches there. There
are other posts that are very similar.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I have a very reproducible scenario. Say that I have a recurring
appt for 6 weeks - every Monday. If I modify one or two of those
(move one maybe to Wednesday), it moves in Outlook 2003, yet after my
mobile device (HTC) sync's, the one instance of appt that was
modifies goes back to the recurring and there is no record that I
modified one occurrence of the appointment.

You'll need to speak with the vendor of your sync software about that.
Outlook doesn't have an active role in the sync, it just holds the data.