Entourage broken time zone support with Sync Services

[tarunr]

Here is the basic setup using Mac OS X 10.4.10 and Entourage 2004
11.3.6:
Completely clean Calendar [On My Computer]
Sync Services turned on for above calendar.
Computer is set to America/Denver. iCal is set to the same
Entourage is set to Mountain Time (US & Canada)

Steps to produce bug:
1) Create a new event in Entourage for 9AM Mountain Time (US & Canada)
for 1 hour
2) Event shows up in iCal as 3PM US/Mountain!

Currently, because of DST, 9AM Mountain is 3PM UTC. Coincident?
Unlikely.

Now consider these steps:
1) Create a new event for say 4PM America/Denver in iCal.
2) Event shows up in Entourage as 10PM Mountain Time (US & Canda)

Clearly this is a two way issue with Entourage and it appears that the
one side or the other is assuming UTC instead of using the correct
timezone as specified.

I know this has worked before, but for the life of me I can't figure
out what I'm doing wrong. The reason I got here is that I was
resyncing all of my Exchange data to iCal (new iPhone) and somewhere,
the time zone calculations got munged.

Any one have any suggestions?
Thanks,
Tarun

 

[tarunr]

Here is the basic setup using Mac OS X 10.4.10 and Entourage 2004
11.3.6:
Completely clean Calendar [On My Computer]
Sync Services turned on for above calendar.
Computer is set to America/Denver. iCal is set to the same
Entourage is set to Mountain Time (US & Canada)

Steps to produce bug:
1) Create a new event in Entourage for 9AM Mountain Time (US & Canada)
for 1 hour
2) Event shows up in iCal as 3PM US/Mountain!

Currently, because of DST, 9AM Mountain is 3PM UTC. Coincident?
Unlikely.

Now consider these steps:
1) Create a new event for say 4PM America/Denver in iCal.
2) Event shows up in Entourage as 10PM Mountain Time (US & Canda)

Clearly this is a two way issue with Entourage and it appears that the
one side or the other is assuming UTC instead of using the correct
timezone as specified.

I know this has worked before, but for the life of me I can't figure
out what I'm doing wrong. The reason I got here is that I was
resyncing all of my Exchange data to iCal (new iPhone) and somewhere,
the time zone calculations got munged.

Any one have any suggestions?
Thanks,
Tarun

So as an additional bit of info... I go home to my MacBook Pro, and it
works there. And what I mean is that with the exact time zone settings
as my work machine for the OS, iCal and Entourage, creating a new
event in one calendar correctly creates it in the other calendar with
the correct time and time zone.

Sigh.

Tarun

 

[Diane]

So as an additional bit of info... I go home to my MacBook Pro, and it
works there. And what I mean is that with the exact time zone settings
as my work machine for the OS, iCal and Entourage, creating a new
event in one calendar correctly creates it in the other calendar with
the correct time and time zone.

Sounds like a setting on your work server.

 

[tarunr]

Sounds like a setting on your work server.

Only wish it were. On both machines I was trying it standalone (with
my local calendar). One works and the other doesn't with what appears
to be the exact same settings.

The one thing I noticed different is that Entourage on my broken
computer always has at the top of the calendar event "Event is in US
Mountain time, you computer is set to American/Denver". My correctly
working computer does not show that message.

It appears that one computer knows that that is the same, while the
other thinks it is two different time zones.

 

[Diane]

The one thing I noticed different is that Entourage on my broken
computer always has at the top of the calendar event "Event is in US
Mountain time, you computer is set to American/Denver". My correctly
working computer does not show that message.

It appears that one computer knows that that is the same, while the
other thinks it is two different time zones.

Sounds like a corrupt preference. I would try changing it first to see if
you can get the correct time to stick.

I'm not sure which pref file holds that info. You could create a new User in
System Preferences. Open Entourage and set the time zone. Now try sorting
your preferences by date and see if you can find it. You'll have to sort the
Microsoft folder in preferences as well as the entire preference folder.

 

[tarunr]

Sounds like a corrupt preference. I would try changing it first to see if
you can get the correct time to stick.

I'm not sure which pref file holds that info. You could create a new User in
System Preferences. Open Entourage and set the time zone. Now try sorting
your preferences by date and see if you can find it. You'll have to sort the
Microsoft folder in preferences as well as the entire preference folder.

Well I appreciate your help, but I've officially given up. I created a
new user on my existing Mac OS X volume and opened up Entourage and it
gave me the same broken behavior. I switched to a new install of Mac
OS X on a new partition, copied over my existing Microsoft Office
install and it gave me the same behavior there!!!

My only thought is that all of this happened when I first blew away
all of my MS Office prefs and that the latest builds of Entourage are
incorrectly doing TZ calcs. Maybe on my home machine (which has
preferences from Office 2004 when it first came out) has some remnant
setting that correctly makes it work. Better not delete those!

Tarun

 

[tarunr]

Well I appreciate your help, but I've officially given up. I created a
new user on my existing Mac OS X volume and opened up Entourage and it
gave me the same broken behavior. I switched to a new install of Mac
OS X on a new partition, copied over my existing Microsoft Office
install and it gave me the same behavior there!!!

My only thought is that all of this happened when I first blew away
all of my MS Office prefs and that the latest builds of Entourage are
incorrectly doing TZ calcs. Maybe on my home machine (which has
preferences from Office 2004 when it first came out) has some remnant
setting that correctly makes it work. Better not delete those!

Tarun

I lied when I said I would give up. It still bugs me!

So I reinstalled from 11.0.0 of Office 2004. Both that version and
11.1.0 don't show a time zone discrepancy. After updating to 11.2.0, I
get Event has different time zone than computer. Calendar will reflect
that (or some such). 11.3.0 and higher give me the two different time
zones message (when in fact both time zones are the same!)

Ugh.
Tarun

 

[Diane]

So I reinstalled from 11.0.0 of Office 2004. Both that version and
11.1.0 don't show a time zone discrepancy. After updating to 11.2.0, I
get Event has different time zone than computer. Calendar will reflect
that (or some such). 11.3.0 and higher give me the two different time
zones message (when in fact both time zones are the same!)

What installers are you using?

There is an 11.3.5 combo that takes the CD version up to 11.3.5. Then there
are two incremental updaters.

11.3.5 combo
11.3.6 requires 11.3.5 to be installed
11.3.7 requires 11.3.6 to be installed

 

[tarunr]

What installers are you using?

There is an 11.3.5 combo that takes the CD version up to 11.3.5. Then there
are two incremental updaters.

11.3.5 combo
11.3.6 requires 11.3.5 to be installed
11.3.7 requires 11.3.6 to be installed

Oh yeah, that would have been the easy way . But I actually wanted
to see at what point my computer started to report that the event time
zone was different than the computer time zone. I used the 11.3.5
updater first and saw the problem immediately. I reinstalled a third
time and applied the service packs sequentially. That's when I saw
that 11.2.0 repeated my problem.

Tarun

 

[tarunr]

I figured it out!!!!!!!

Microsoft, please test on Case Sensitive File systems for Mac OS X!

Basically, some where in Entourage, timezones.xml is called as
Timezones.xml. There is no such file on a case-sensitive file system.
To fix this,

1) cd /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office (or the appropriately
situated place on your machine)
2) ln -s timezones.xml Timezones.xml

Everything is fixed!

Many thanks to Jay who message me privately about the existence of the
Timezones file, which I didn't know existed. I'll send him a message
separately to tell him the fix.

Tarun

 

[Jolly Roger]

Microsoft, please test on Case Sensitive File systems for Mac OS X!

I suspect you'll encounter problems with other parts of Mac OS X and
other thurd-party applications on a case-sensitive file system.

Just curious: Why did you format as case-seneitive to begin with?

 

[tarunr]

I suspect you'll encounter problems with other parts of Mac OS X and
other thurd-party applications on a case-sensitive file system.

Just curious: Why did you format as case-seneitive to begin with?

There was an issue with Google Earth a while ago (quickly fixed) and I
guess CS3 doesn't install still with Case-Sensitive FS.

I use the filesystem because I reside mostly in the UNIX side of Mac
OS X and check out items from subversion from a linux box. That "may"
have case-sensitive files on there. More importantly however is that
we deploy to Linux which does have a case-sensitive file system. If we
use the insensitive file system, we may not find a bug until it is
deployed.

Sadly.. it appears I still have a one way sync issue with this. Items
created in iCal now show up in Entourage correctly. Entourage no
longer claims the event time zone and the computer time zone are
different; however, the syncing still doesn't work correctly. iCal
events get correctly pushed to Entourage, but they do not vice versa.
I may try and create a small non sensitive file system via a disk
image and try running Office from there.

 

[Jolly Roger]

There was an issue with Google Earth a while ago (quickly fixed) and I
guess CS3 doesn't install still with Case-Sensitive FS.

I use the filesystem because I reside mostly in the UNIX side of Mac
OS X and check out items from subversion from a linux box. That "may"
have case-sensitive files on there. More importantly however is that
we deploy to Linux which does have a case-sensitive file system. If we
use the insensitive file system, we may not find a bug until it is
deployed.

Thanks for explaining. Seems like you definitely have a legitimate
need to run case-sentivie.

Sadly.. it appears I still have a one way sync issue with this. Items
created in iCal now show up in Entourage correctly. Entourage no
longer claims the event time zone and the computer time zone are
different; however, the syncing still doesn't work correctly. iCal
events get correctly pushed to Entourage, but they do not vice versa.

I wonder why...

 

[austad]

Thanks for explaining. Seems like you definitely have a legitimate
need to run case-sentivie.


I wonder why...

FIXED. Special thanks to Tarun Reddy for noticing that the problem
only appears when using a case-sensitive filesystem. I used fs_usage
to log all file accesses and wrote a bunch of scripts to get me a list
of possible files. I had a list of 536 candidate files after the
scripting and went through all of them by hand until I found it.

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /usr/share/zoneinfo/utc

 

[tarunr]

FIXED. Special thanks to Tarun Reddy for noticing that the problem
only appears when using a case-sensitive filesystem. I used fs_usage
to log all file accesses and wrote a bunch of scripts to get me a list
of possible files. I had a list of 536 candidate files after the
scripting and went through all of them by hand until I found it.

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /usr/share/zoneinfo/utc

I can verify that with this symlink and the one for timezone.xml,
everything Syncs correctly. Thank you!!

Tarun

 

[Jolly Roger]

I can verify that with this symlink and the one for timezone.xml,
everything Syncs correctly. Thank you!!

This sounds like a great potential entry in the Entourage MVP FAQ page!
Diane, what do you think?

 

[Diane]

This sounds like a great potential entry in the Entourage MVP FAQ page!
Diane, what do you think?

I'll get it posted soon on the "Find Solutions for Crashes, Conflicts and
General Problems"

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/crashes.html>

I'll also link to it from the Time page:

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq_topic/time.html>

Getting it posted is half the battle. The other part is making is so users
can find the info.

 

[William Smith]

FIXED. Special thanks to Tarun Reddy for noticing that the problem
only appears when using a case-sensitive filesystem. I used fs_usage
to log all file accesses and wrote a bunch of scripts to get me a list
of possible files. I had a list of 536 candidate files after the
scripting and went through all of them by hand until I found it.

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/UTC /usr/share/zoneinfo/utc

This is a really fascinating problem (and solution) considering that the
11.3.3 update should have changed Entourage's behavior to use the system
timezone information rather than using its own.

Diane has provided the original problem and solution to Microsoft and
I've asked for some clarification of when the different files are used
(Panther vs. Tiger, 11.3.2 vs. 11.3.3 and later, etc.). I think these
solutions may make good additions to The Entourage Help Page once we
understand how Entourage accesses time zone information.

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>

 

[tarunr]

I'll get it posted soon on the "Find Solutions for Crashes, Conflicts and
General Problems"

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/crashes.html>

I'll also link to it from the Time page:

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq_topic/time.html>

Diane,

Can you please change the Title to the MVP FAQ entry?
"Entourage broken time zone support with Sync Services when using a
Unix server" isn't quite appropriate because it has nothing to do with
using a Unix server.

More appropriately, "Entourage broken time zone support with Sync
Services when installed on case-sensitive filesystem".

Thanks,
Tarun

 

[Diane]

Can you please change the Title to the MVP FAQ entry?
"Entourage broken time zone support with Sync Services when using a
Unix server" isn't quite appropriate because it has nothing to do with
using a Unix server.

More appropriately, "Entourage broken time zone support with Sync
Services when installed on case-sensitive filesystem".

Done. If you wouldn't mind, I would like to add Tarun as the contributor.