A couple of weeks ago I posted about some problems I’d been seeing with my iPhone not quite syncing all of the changes to my mailbox. At work we’ve been doing a bit more investigation around this after we found that a few of the guys out in the business with iPhones were having similar problems.
So far we’ve been able to identify and replicate some pretty significant issues with how the iPhone deals with calendars and mailboxes that have recurring meetings and delegates – i.e. someone like a personal assistant who also has access to a calendar and mailbox. The end result is that people can end up with:
- – Missing calendar entries on their phone (even though they exist in Outlook)
- – Calendar entries on their phone for deleted/cancelled meetings
- – Multiple calendar entries for the same meeting
Having seen this happen it can be pretty frustrating for the end users. These particular problems will only effect a fairly limited number of people – how many people have PA’s and deligates? But those that do tend to be relatively senior.
There are some known issues with how the Activesync protocol deals with delegates in Exchange 2003, but the iPhone seems to have more problems with it than other Exchange Activesync clients.
There is some mention of this problem on the Apple support forums, but no information about a fix. Hopefully now that we have some repeatable scenarios we can help resolve the problem.
(Cheers to the guys at work who did the testing!)
I’ve been experiencing some of the similar problems with my calendar on Exchange 2003. There is a temporary fix, just in case you haven’t tried it yourself and not excusing the fact that this shouldn’t be happening!
If you switch off the Calendar sync on the iPhone in the mail settings, this will remove all sync’ed data. Switching it back on again then causes it to refresh data from the server so all duplicate meetings and stale meeting requests disappear. Not ideal, and if you have any events in your iPhone that have not been pushed to exchange you could loose these, but I didn’t experience any of these.
I just posted a reply to a thread about something similar to this at http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9837416#9837416. It appears that turning off Cached Exchange Mode on the users Exchange account fixes some of these problems.