Sync LB with iCal Exchange calendars
Greetings,
I've been working on using LB on my Mac and syncing with an Exchange iCal calendars. Now that Leopard supports exchange out of the box this can be done.
iCal creates two calendars for Exchange, one called Calendar which has all the actual calendar appointments and one called "Tasks" which contains all the tasks in Exchange. Note that these are different calendars.
I have been trying to configure my LB outline to sync with these and I'm having some difficulties. When I sync a portion of the outline with the "Tasks" calendar then move the task to another portion of the outline that is not sync'd with iCal, the task is recreated in the portion of the outline that is sync'd with iCal. This results in duplicate tasks in my LB outline. Also when I mark a task as done, the effect is not replicated on the "Tasks" iCal calendar.
A similar process occurs when I sync a portion of the outline to the iCal Exchange "Calendar" calendar. Everything from the calendar appears in LB but when I move the LB task to another section of the outline, the appointment reappears in the original portion of the outline upon the next sync.
The only thing I can think of doing is to sync every portion of my LB outline with either the iCal Exchange "Calendar" calendar or the "Tasks" calendar. I have to use Exchange at work and ultimately want to get all my tasks into LB including calendar events to get credit for them.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Hawaiisempi
Syncing all of your LB calendars might help
When you move a task or calendar event in Life Balance from a synced project to an unsynced one, it sends a "delete" command to remove the task or event from iCal. It sounds like Exchange is ignoring or overriding the delete command and is re-entering the task or event into iCal.
There are a couple of other ways you could set things up that might interact better with Exchange, but I can't guarantee they'll work better. It all depends on whether Exchange is willing to cooperate or not.
One possibility is to change the iCal sync settings in Life Balance so that all of your toplevel projects sync with the iCal "Calendar" and "Tasks" calendars. That way no matter where you move the tasks within Life Balance, they won't be deleted from iCal. That should avoid the situation where Exchange re-creates the item, creating a duplicate.
Another possibility is to create a third iCal calendar, maybe called "Life Balance", and have all of your other Life Balance projects sync with that calendar. That way when you move an item within Life Balance, it will only be moved to a different iCal calendar -- it won't be deleted. Depending on how Exchange is written, it might be happier with that.
If you try either of these solutions, please let us know how things turn out. I'm sure other customers would be interested in knowing.