iCal sync does not work in Entourage 2008

[CBDC]

Nothing is now syncing - I've had my iPhone since July 1, 2007. Nary a problem. I suspect that it's the latest MS Office update because that's all that's changed. I cannot get Entourage to sync with iCal, Address Book, or my iPhone. MY calendar in my iPhone is blank. It used to be full of inf. Fortunately, my contacts are still there but none of the new info I've added. I've reset sync data. I've reset sync data, I've turned preferences on an off in .mac. I've restored my iPhone. Syncing is NOT working.

 

[Fred_Davenport]

Count me as another long-time Apple and Office user who cannot import/sync/export my contacts/calendar to and/or from Entourage and iCal.

I am totally shocked that this cannot happen easily.

Appears to be many work-arounds that are hit or miss.

Hope Apple and MS will help us.

 

[Fred_Davenport]

Thx JR,

Hard to believe that MS (& Apple) does not monitor this site.

For the record, I have sent Feedback to both the Apple and MS sites, but have found these discussion chats MUCH more effective and helpful.

 

[William Smith]

Hard to believe that MS (& Apple) does not monitor this site.

Hi Fred!

FYI, this "site" (www.officeformac.com) is Microsoft's but it's just
pointing to the newsgroups, which are accessible via NNTP, Google and
dozens of other sites. All the postings you see are part of Usenet,
which is a system outside of Microsoft.

The analogy that I give folks is that Microsoft, Google and others have
put up big pearly gates to Central Park and they'd love for you to pass
through their big pearly gates and have you think they own (or are
responsible for) Central Park. But you don't have to necessarily use
their pearly gates because Central Park is freely accessible to everyone.

--

bill

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

 

[cwilliams1]

I can't sync my iCal calendar at all in 2008. I have sync turned in preferences. It does not show me any options to choose which calendar to sync. Same on my Macbook. The address book does sync even though that doesn't show up to.

I have tried creating a new identity and I get the same thing.
At the moment this is unusable.

----------------------------
I know how frustrating this can be. However, I have done this with iCal and it does work. Try the following steps:
1. Open Entourage and choose Preferences.
2. Highlight Sync Services.
3. After reviewing what you wrote, you also want to sync your address book as well. No problem. Place a check mark in the Address Book field and in the iCal field.
4. To apply all of that, click OK.
5. Now, minimize Entourage and open iCal.
6. Once you open iCal, be sure what you didn't mess with any of its preferences. Look in the 'CALNEDARS' section on the left hand on your screen. On mine, I see:
•Home
•Work
•Entourage
Make sure that you have the Entourage calendar checked.
All of your appointments should appear in iCal.
7. Once you're done in iCal, you can close it and open Address Book.
8. As long as you have contacts (same as iCal)/appointments in your application you are syncing from, you should see your appointments or contacts at the other place you are syncing from. When you open Address Book, you should see your contacts that are in Entourage in your Address Book. (NOTE: It IS normal to get a message saying that there is a conflict with different contacts/appointments. REVIEW them and click on which one is correct and press OK.

I hope this helped.

 

[Juddy]

After spending several days trying to resolve the syncing problem in Entourage 2008, I deleted only it from my system, installed Entourage 2004 (luckily I have both). I now can sync my Palm Pilot just as I did before upgrading. Giving up the syncing capability was too much a price to pay for any other new features in Entourage 2004. I am now running all the Office 2008 products except Entourage 2008. I use Entourage 2004.

Sad isn't it! :coolfrown:

 

[Juddy]

After spending several days trying to resolve the syncing problem in Entourage 2008, I deleted only it from my system, installed Entourage 2004 (luckily I have both). I now can sync my Palm Pilot just as I did before upgrading. Giving up the syncing capability was too much a price to pay for any other new features in Entourage 2008. I am now running all the Office 2008 products except Entourage 2008. I use Entourage 2004.

 

[Kerry]

After spending several days trying to resolve the syncing problem in Entourage 2008, I deleted only it from my system, installed Entourage 2004 (luckily I have both). I now can sync my Palm Pilot just as I did before upgrading.. Giving up the syncing capability was too much a price to pay for any othernew features in Entourage 2004. I am now running all the Office 2008 products except Entourage 2008. I use Entourage 2004.

Sad isn't it! :coolfrown:

There is a serious sync services issue in Entourage which Microsoft is
aware of. If more than one module is turned on, it will mess up
Calendar syncs - dups and info changes just not getting reflected in
Calendar however you'll find iCal will be fine. The workaround is to
only have one module running. In my case, I just have Calendar turned
on. Its best to turn all sync serv items in Entourage off, delete your
iCal Entourage calendar,then turn on Calendar sync in Entourage using
combine. It will recreate the Entourage calendar in iCal and then
sync's will work perfectly. The real problem is if you need to change
something in addressbook or notes. You need to go through all these
gyrations to sync those then get back to a stable Calendar sync.
Microsoft, according to a customer relations person I spoke to has, no
time frame on a fix.

 

[Electroscribe]

This is a good point: Only have Entourage sync its calendar with the Apple stuff, not its address books.

I have found the best way to copy Entourage contacts into Apple Address Book is:
1. Create an empty folder on your Mac desktop.
2. Open Entourage
3. Select Contacts
4. Option-drag all of the Contacts (to copy them) into the empty folder. Be patient -- it takes a few minutes. You should create a bunch of .vcf addresbook cards.
5. Quit Entourage.
6. Open Apple Address Book
7. Drag the .v-cards from the folder into the Apple address book (again this takes time). If you get duplicates, use the dialogue box to resolve them.

--DON'T-- try this in reverse. If you try dragging more than one Apple Address Book contact into a file, it will lump all of the contacts into one jumbled up v-card. It only works going from Entourage. You could probably simply drag the contacts from Entourage into Apple Address Book, but doing it "the hard way" helps prevent contaminating your Entourage database, and gives you a free backup of your contacts to boot. You can also drag the contacts in the folder you created into another Entourage database file, or even (one contact at a time) into Outlook for Windows.

John L

 

[Snoball]

Here's the latest announcement regarding Apple's Snow Leopard OSX update. Good bye Microsoft. This is what happens when you don't pay attention to your customers needs:

"Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into Mail, Address Book, and iCal. Mac OS X uses the Exchange Web Services protocol to provide access to Exchange Server 2007. Because Exchange is supported on your Mac and iPhone, you'll be able to use them anywhere with full access to your email, contacts, and calendar."

 

[J Chan]

Mac Office has driven me insane.
1. Does not work with spaces. Will shoot to another "space" by itself without my intention.
2. No background scrolling (minor issue)
3. Entourage: does not sync directly to blackberry. If I input a calendar event in my blackberry, it doesnt sync to the entourage "calendar" in iCal. Then I have to manually go into iCal and change it to entourage.
3a: Not able to import Outlook 2007 to Entourage.
4. SP1: I thought SP1 would solve a lot of these problems. Nope, it gave me more problems. In fact, I couldnt open any of my documents anymore! double click on a word, excel, powerpoint file and wouldnt open.

Im sure there are thousands of people out there who have the same gripes that I do. I just cant imagine the other thousands of people that dont have the time to research all these problems that we do. The people who depend on their products to plain old work.

 

[JoJ]

Hello,

I want to do this also, and am prepared to live within the constrainsts of having one calendar only in iCal that syncs. However, There is no new iCal called Entourage on my iCal! I even turned ical sync off and then back on again. (Address book is synced no perfectly.) Anything I can do?

 

[Electroscribe]

As some folks from the Microsoft community have pointed out before, it appears Apple's iSync is broken under Leopard. If one visit's MacFixIt, one can find a thread on that (read the comments). It was thought 10.5.3 fixed some of the issues, but according to some users, that is not the case. <http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=2008052911201918>

This is why it is critical for Microsoft to develop a conduit that works independently of iSync, unless they are trying to drive us to Outlook (am just about to do that, too, because I am tired of running Entourage 2004 just to sync with my PDA).

 

[Diane Ross]

I want to do this also, and am prepared to live within the constrainsts of
having one calendar only in iCal that syncs. However, There is no new iCal
called Entourage on my iCal! I even turned ical sync off and then back on
again. (Address book is synced no perfectly.) Anything I can do?

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/syncservices/ical.html#calsync5>

 

[JMiguel]

I don't know if this "solution" for syncing between iCal and Entourage has been posted, but I just applied it on my MBP.

1. Enable the sync conduits in Entourage->Preferences. This creates an Entourage Calendar in iCal.
2. Export any calendars you might already have in iCal to the Desktop (.ics format)
3. Import (in iCal) the .ics files from the desktop into the Entourage calendar created within iCal.
4. After Entourage has "imported" al the events in from iCal->Entourage Calendar, feel free to delete the original calendars in iCal (the ones you exported in the first place!

Until Microsoft comes to its senses and develops an independent conduit from iSync, this is the best solution I came up with for Entourage 2008. Still, syncing with your PDA/iPhone or publishing a specific calendar becomes a pain.. but there's workarounds for all of this.. but still.... MICROSOFT: WE NEED AN INDEPENDENT, WORKING AND EFFICIENT CONDUIT TO GET THE JOB WELL DONE!!!!

 

[Barry Wainwright]

Thx JR,

Hard to believe that MS (& Apple) does not monitor this site.

For the record, I have sent Feedback to both the Apple and MS sites, but have
found these discussion chats MUCH more effective and helpful.

I'm sure they look into them from time to time, but this forum/newsgroup
is primarily a vehicle for peer to peer help - that is, users helping
other users.

In this case, sync is just plain broken, and there is no help to be
offered. I don't know if Apple broke it or if MS broke it. Most likely
some combination of the two. I do know that they are working hard on
fixing it. I don't know when that fix will arrive.

Thanks for sending Feedback, it is the only sure way to get your message
through to MS.

I wish we had more assistance to give but I, like most people, have had
to turn syncing off because it just messes things up at the moment.

 

[Electroscribe]

Believe it is Apple's conduit that is broken. This has been an ongoing issue with previous versions of iCal and up until Office 2008, was one of the things that kept me using Entourage.

Lack of PDA conduits is moving me away from Entourage 2008 -- that and Office Notify's constant reinstallation of itself as a startup item everytime I launch Entourage or any other Office 2008 application (separate issue). Notification delays startup by as much as 60 seconds.

Oh, that's right, Microsoft does not have time to monitor this. I don't have time to send them a separate posting -- those startup delays are eating a lot of my extra time.

 

[ltimpe007]

Does anyone have double holiday issues within iCal? seems like i only have the Entourage calander selected within iCal, but it visually shows double holidays. I also notice within Entourage 2008 calander it is only showing holidays as single? Do i take off show holidays within Entourage because iCal already has those days marked?

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Does anyone have double holiday issues within iCal? seems like i only
have the Entourage calander selected within iCal, but it visually shows
double holidays. I also notice within Entourage 2008 calander it is only
showing holidays as single? Do i take off show holidays within Entourage
because iCal already has those days marked?

I dont have this issue. I had it with birthdays (because iCal was adding
a special birthday calendar), but that's it.
Do both instances of the holidays belong to the same calendar
(Entourage) in iCal??

Corentin

 

[Itay]

Have you used Sync Services before (in Entourage 2004)? Entourage has
a rather idiosyncratic approach to calendar synching; if Sync Services
is turned on, a new calendar is created in iCal, called "Entourage". Events
created in Entourage show up in that calendar, and if you create events
in iCal, they need to be in that calendar as well or else they won't show
up in Entourage. If you want to get items from iCal into Entourage, you
now know what to do: right-click them and put them into the "Entourage"
calendar. Many users would prefer if they could set up Entourage to synch
categories to iCal calendars; if that sounds like what you would like
to have as well, click on Send Feedback on Entourage inside Entourage's
help menu to let Microsoft know.





-- Michel Bintener Microsoft MVP Office:Mac (Entourage & Word)





***Always reply to the newsgroup.***





(e-mail address removed) wrote: > I can't sync my iCal calendar at all
in 2008. I have sync turned in > preferences. It does not show me any
options to choose which calendar to > sync. Same on my Macbook. The address
book does sync even though that > doesn't show up to. > I have tried creating
a new identity and I get the same thing. > At the moment this is unusable.