Multiple Holiday entries in the calendar

N

nabaum

One of our users is running the latest Entourage against an Exchange
2003 server. The user is setup with an IMAP account plus the extra
Exchange functionality for directory searching and scheduling
free/busy data.

Everything is setup and working, however since moving from a POP
server to Exchange 2003, Entourage has created around 25,000 calendar
entries. These entries are created on the client and get synced to
the server, so they count against his mail quota.

Basically what he's seeing is for each US national holiday between the
years 2000 and 2005 there are roughly 300 identical items. For
instance, St. Patrick's Day has 300 separate calendar items.

I'm wondering if any other users have experienced this behavior. If
so, what's the best way to clear this out? Also, I'm guessing there
is a setting in Entourage to include holidays in the calendar. Where
is this setting?

Thanks for your help,
Nate
 
D

David Blaymires

One of our users is running the latest Entourage against an Exchange
2003 server. The user is setup with an IMAP account plus the extra
Exchange functionality for directory searching and scheduling
free/busy data.

Everything is setup and working, however since moving from a POP
server to Exchange 2003, Entourage has created around 25,000 calendar
entries. These entries are created on the client and get synced to
the server, so they count against his mail quota.

Basically what he's seeing is for each US national holiday between the
years 2000 and 2005 there are roughly 300 identical items. For
instance, St. Patrick's Day has 300 separate calendar items.

I'm wondering if any other users have experienced this behavior. If
so, what's the best way to clear this out? Also, I'm guessing there
is a setting in Entourage to include holidays in the calendar. Where
is this setting?

Thanks for your help,
Nate
Click to expand...

I've seen this more times than I care to remember. Its a corruption that
occurs when the synchronisation between Entourage and Exchange gets tied up
in knots. Everything gets screwed up.

The only "sure fire" way we found to eliminate this problem was to create a
new account for the user, and not allow them to use holidays from the
Exchange server. For some reason they end up all out of sorts, and
Entourage and Exchange get a huge dose of indigestion/constipation, and
create multiple entries for the same event.

Entourage also has a problem with recurring appointments, particularly when
one or more of those recurring appointments gets moved to a different
timeslot. Then you end up with multiples as well. Note, we also had
multiple address book entries created as well as the 20,000 plus public
holidays.

To really spice up your life, try adding in to the mix syncing with a Palm
OS device. Then watch how you can run out of memory!

An option to try (Note: creating a new account is painful for the user who
loses everything that they previously had):

1. Do a Find (multiple criteria) looking for all calendar events with Day
in the name as well as having a category of NONE.

2. When they get listed in the results window, it should give you all
holidays. You have two ways of deleting them - select all, then click on
the delete button (wait a LONG time for the computer to respond when you do
this, it takes Entourage a VERY LONG time [I'm not exaggerating] to complete
this task), or delete them in batches of a few hundred by selecting a range
then clicking on delete.

3. After completing the housekeeping in [2], in the Advanced tab of the
Exchange Account (under the Tools menu/Accounts), select RESET
SYNCHRONISATION. This will force Entourage and Exchange to start their
syncing again.

Ask your user if they ever get Entourage hanging with the dreaded beach
ball, when the only way out for them is to force quit Entourage. This
situation was when we found that the events were multiplying again. We also
tried deleting all holidays and importing nice clean holidays in Entourage
that had not previously been in Exchange. Even that failed to work...

Frustration finally got the better of us and we deleted the user account in
the Active Directory, and therefore their Exchange Account, and created a
new one.

I hope you have better luck. Alternatively, tell the user to start taking
their public holidays - you should take some too. By the time you get this
one sorted, you will have earned the extra ones.
 
N

nabaum

David Blaymires said:
One of our users is running the latest Entourage against an Exchange
2003 server. The user is setup with an IMAP account plus the extra
Exchange functionality for directory searching and scheduling
free/busy data.

Everything is setup and working, however since moving from a POP
server to Exchange 2003, Entourage has created around 25,000 calendar
entries. These entries are created on the client and get synced to
the server, so they count against his mail quota.

Basically what he's seeing is for each US national holiday between the
years 2000 and 2005 there are roughly 300 identical items. For
instance, St. Patrick's Day has 300 separate calendar items.

I'm wondering if any other users have experienced this behavior. If
so, what's the best way to clear this out? Also, I'm guessing there
is a setting in Entourage to include holidays in the calendar. Where
is this setting?

Thanks for your help,
Nate
Click to expand...

I've seen this more times than I care to remember. Its a corruption that
occurs when the synchronisation between Entourage and Exchange gets tied up
in knots. Everything gets screwed up.

The only "sure fire" way we found to eliminate this problem was to create a
new account for the user, and not allow them to use holidays from the
Exchange server. For some reason they end up all out of sorts, and
Entourage and Exchange get a huge dose of indigestion/constipation, and
create multiple entries for the same event.

Entourage also has a problem with recurring appointments, particularly when
one or more of those recurring appointments gets moved to a different
timeslot. Then you end up with multiples as well. Note, we also had
multiple address book entries created as well as the 20,000 plus public
holidays.

To really spice up your life, try adding in to the mix syncing with a Palm
OS device. Then watch how you can run out of memory!

An option to try (Note: creating a new account is painful for the user who
loses everything that they previously had):

1. Do a Find (multiple criteria) looking for all calendar events with Day
in the name as well as having a category of NONE.

2. When they get listed in the results window, it should give you all
holidays. You have two ways of deleting them - select all, then click on
the delete button (wait a LONG time for the computer to respond when you do
this, it takes Entourage a VERY LONG time [I'm not exaggerating] to complete
this task), or delete them in batches of a few hundred by selecting a range
then clicking on delete.

3. After completing the housekeeping in [2], in the Advanced tab of the
Exchange Account (under the Tools menu/Accounts), select RESET
SYNCHRONISATION. This will force Entourage and Exchange to start their
syncing again.

Ask your user if they ever get Entourage hanging with the dreaded beach
ball, when the only way out for them is to force quit Entourage. This
situation was when we found that the events were multiplying again. We also
tried deleting all holidays and importing nice clean holidays in Entourage
that had not previously been in Exchange. Even that failed to work...

Frustration finally got the better of us and we deleted the user account in
the Active Directory, and therefore their Exchange Account, and created a
new one.

I hope you have better luck. Alternatively, tell the user to start taking
their public holidays - you should take some too. By the time you get this
one sorted, you will have earned the extra ones.
Click to expand...

Thanks David. I'll give your suggestions a try.
 
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