[winger13]

My setup is two PC's (one at work, one at home), one BB. Both PC's Outlook are Outlook 2003, SP3. I do not use BES. I sync my BB to both PCs.

I have experiencing specific issues where updates to existing Outlook Calendar (mtg notes) and Contact (contact notes) are not being sync'd from one PC to the next PC (via my BB device - Sprint Curve 8330 running OS v4.5.0.131). I sync PC's to my BB using BB Desktop Mgr (v4.7) and USB cable.


Here are specific details of what I am doing to duplicate the issues.

1) Calendar:
I have been away from work the past two days. In that time, I have updated two (2) calendar items at my PC at home - both items are at my work PC as well.

Item one: I moved the date from Wed to Thurs, and added a note - done from home PC
Item two: I changed the description of the meeting, and shortened appt from 3 hrs to two hrs - done from home PC

Both items sync OK with my BB

Upon coming to work this morning, neither sync'd to my work PC. I finally did the following:

Item one: I deleted from Desktop Outlook, opened in BB put a space in the meeting description saved.
Item two: Opened on BB, put a space in the meeting description saved.

UPDATE: I just tested again with another existing Calendar entry update issue example - the key here is as long as the entry is saved on the BB device, it WILL fix the sync issue with the second PC/computer. So, on this example, I entered a space in the description, deleted the space, then saved.

Upon resyncing, here is what happened

Item one: Sync Mgr noticed conflict of deleting from PC and changed in BB. I chose to copy item to PC. This results in syncing correctly to PC
Item two: Sync'd to PC correctly.

Something is NOT right. The sync process did NOT recognize these two items that changed until I manually intervened (re-saving (with an update) on the BB device first).

2) Contact:
I ran a test today where on my work PC, I added a comment into one contact's note. I successfully sync'd that contact note to my BB. However, when I sync the BB with my home PC, that note did NOT make it to the home PC.

I opened the contact (in edit mode) on my BB, inserted a space to the contact's name, erased the space, and saved the contact.

I then sync'd the BB to the home PC again. This time, success - the contact's note got sync'd to the home PC.


HELP

I have seen this sort of thing a few times before (where sync did not sync a Calendar event/mtg correctly) in the past three months or so I owned my BB - but this is the first time I decided to actually test out the fix. This is the first time I noticed with a contact (maybe b/c i do not look at my Contacts updates as closely as I do my Calendar mtgs updates)

[winger13]

The way I see it, when the BB device is synching to the 2nd computer (before my temp fix of opening the affected contact or event, and resaving), the BB device does NOT know it has changed. That way it does not force a change to PC2.

Anyway to confirm this is the issue, and if it is, what is the fix?

[vliou]

I have indeed seen this with the wired sync. Some customers have mentioned this, but the wireless OTA sync solutions out there (almost all of them, including my competitors) can get around this using our proprietary tagging techniques.

I remember in the days when I had to wire sync, I just did more recovers, that got rid of my issue, but that was also years ago on OS 4.0....

[winger13]

Originally Posted by vliou

I have indeed seen this with the wired sync. Some customers have mentioned this, but the wireless OTA sync solutions out there (almost all of them, including my competitors) can get around this using our proprietary tagging techniques.

I remember in the days when I had to wire sync, I just did more recovers, that got rid of my issue, but that was also years ago on OS 4.0....

what wireless OTA solution? Again, I sync to my works' PC and home PC. For the work PC, since I am using a personal BB device, canNOT get data wirelessly. For my home PC, maybe I can ?


*** anyways, an update. I erased the BB config data on both PC's and resync'd from scratch (per BB tech support's suggestion). Within one day, I managed to re-create/see the same sync issue AGAIN. HELP !!!

[winger13]

So, after two tickets with BB, here is their answer - basically they are just NOW deciding synching between multiple PCs is not supported

KB#18693
View Document

Best practices for synchronizing your BlackBerry smartphone with multiple computers
Doc ID : KB18693
Last Modified : 06-29-2009
Document Type : Support

Overview
The synchronization component of BlackBerry Desktop Manager may display troubled behavior when synchronizing with multiple computers due to synchronization histories not being static between the different computers. Due to these conditions two-way synchronization is only supported with a single computer.

If you perform two-way synchronizations with multiple computers, it is possible that the changes may not be detected. If the configuration settings are then reset, duplication may occur depending on the changes that have been made to the information that was synchronized.

When requiring information to be distributed among multiple computers with a BlackBerry smartphone as the center point, the best practice is to choose a single computer to perform two-way synchronizations with and perform one-way synchronizations from the BlackBerry smartphone to all other computers to import the information from the BlackBerry smartphone to the computer.

[winger13]

I just received a follow-up email from BB tech. There does NOT appear to be plans in near future releases of Desktop Manager to support sync across multiple PC's .

So - any suggestions that WORK? I really want to keep at least my Calendar and Contact sync between my two PC's.

FYI - By "PIM data", I mean contacts, calender, task and memo info, NOT email. (Email on my BB is now taken care of my the device's/BB server's BIS setup)

[winger13]

Originally Posted by winger13

I just received a follow-up email from BB tech. There does NOT appear to be plans in near future releases of Desktop Manager to support sync across multiple PC's .

So - any suggestions that WORK? I really want to keep at least my Calendar and Contact sync between my two PC's.

FYI - By "PIM data", I mean contacts, calender, task and memo info, NOT email. (Email on my BB is now taken care of my the device's/BB server's BIS setup)

I am trying the open-source application funambol (Funambol Open Source Mobile Cloud Sync and Push Email for Billions of Phones) - experiencing some hiccups for now, but working on it.