Duplicate Contact Entries & Disappearing Events in Entourage 2008

G

gorg7778

I'm running Office (Entourage) 2008 with 'Sync' checked on a macbook pro with 2GB RAM.

1. Randomly, but more often then not, Entourage is creating approximately 6-10 duplicates of each contact. Having over 1300 its not a time saving solution to manually delete them. I'm surprised there's no de-duping option. Occassionally, the problem seems to mysteriously correct itself upon a new session however, this is rare. What's the solution here?

2. Sometimes, upon opening Entourage, all my events/appointments in the calendar view are GONE. While a great way to free up my life for more recreation, my clients aren't equally amused when I miss their appointments. What's the solution here?

I suspect that "sync" has something to do with this but these, especially the later, are MAJOR issues I hope you will address very soon.

Thank you.
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur

I'm running Office (Entourage) 2008 with 'Sync' checked on a macbook pro
with 2GB RAM.
Click to expand...


Well.... here is the problem!

SyncServices are just plain broken right now. An update is scheduled for
March 11th and I *hope* it will address the issue.....

Corentin
 
G

gorg7778

Yikes. That seems a bit fundamental...how did that one slip by? Thanks for the answer.
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur

Yikes. That seems a bit fundamental...how did that one slip by? Thanks
for the answer.
Click to expand...


I have no clue how that issue managed to slip by, but I would say that
SyncService issues are generating a good 60-70% (if not more) of the
traffic in this group. Obviously problematic :-|

Corentin
 
K

Kerry

I'm running Office (Entourage) 2008 with 'Sync' checked on a macbook pro with 2GB RAM.

1. Randomly, but more often then not, Entourage is creating approximately 6-10 duplicates of each contact. Having over 1300 its not a time saving solution to manually delete them. I'm surprised there's no de-duping option. Occassionally, the problem seems to mysteriously correct itself upon a new session however, this is rare. What's the solution here?

2. Sometimes, upon opening Entourage, all my events/appointments in the calendar view are GONE. While a great way to free up my life for more recreation, my clients aren't equally amused when I miss their appointments. What's the solution here?

I suspect that "sync" has something to do with this but these, especially the later, are MAJOR issues I hope you will address very soon.

Thank you.
Click to expand...

Yes sync services is broken. I am having the same results as you plus
tons of other weird behaviors. I decided enough so I am using just
iCal and Addressbook which sync without issue using Missing Sync. But
I miss the power of Entourage which iCal can't even begin to match.
But the sync to my Palm is critical in the way I work. I never spent
anytime on this in 2004 with the conduit and have literally wasted
hours upon hours trying to make Entourage play nice with Sync
Services. Its impossible.

It will be interesting to see if the update corrects the problem but
in my discussions with Microsoft and Apple, I'm not sure as they have
no clue other than Microsoft tech support admits now its a mess. It
actually sounds fairly complex in terms of how this is going to get
fixed as we're dealing with two companies, multi-layered interactions
etc. With iCal, the interaction is just less complicated and Missing
Sync built those conduits and they know what they're doing.
 
G

gorg7778

How can they be taking so long to respond to such a critical issue? I have lost HOURS AND HOURS dealing with this mess and having to manually delete duplicates! Not even a de-dupping tool in the mean time? This is database 101!

An irate customer, er, I mean, paying beta tester. :angry:
 
W

Warren Gaskill

And in the past couple of weeks, I have had contacts on my iMac each multiply 6 times over.

This started when I got a Mac Book, anticipating that the a change made in desktop, laptop and .mac would show up in each spot as advertised.

Other things (calendar, mail) seem to sync fine. But the contacts are not. And, of course, there is no way to eliminate duplicate contacts in Entourage 2008.

Any idea about solutions or when this will be fixed?
 
W

wg

Thanks for the links on getting rid of the duplicates. I will give it a try.

But the question remains: Why are they duplicating in the 1st place, and what should I do to block them from doing so again?
 
D

Diane Ross

But the question remains: Why are they duplicating in the 1st place, and what
should I do to block them from doing so again?
Click to expand...

Sync Services are not working correctly. Anytime you involve multiple
applications and then throw in new versions, stuff happens. The first
release of Office 2008 was so bad most people turned Sync Services off. The
12.0.1 updater has helped, but it's a combination of MSFT and Apple software
that has to be fine tuned. I expect the next big release for Leopard will
show a lot more stability as well as the next update for Office.

In the mean time, be sure you have a base copy for backup. Here's a good
article by Bill Smith, MVP on syncing.

Everything you wanted to know about syncing. The Truth, The Whole Truth, and
Nothing But The Truth.

³Why does syncing play Gossip with my contacts?³

<http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2007/07/why_does_the_syncing_play_goss.html>

<http://tinyurl.com/34qkrv>
 
W

wg

Thanks for the info.

Installing and using the ID Duplicates script that you referenced in the link above worked. I had it ID all but one (there were 9 copies of each contact)of the contacts. Then filtered show only those marked in Duplicate category. Selected all of those and deleted. Had to do this twice to ID and eliminate all.

Will now test some with the Apple and MS sync settings to see if I can narrow down as to why this happens.

But from your note, it sounds as if we all will have to wait for version updates of each.

Thanks again
 
Top