iPhone / no sync of calendar and contacts

[florian]

I cannot speak to how or not support was able to understand and drill into this, but if you send me a PM or Email, I'm happy to put you in touch with the support manager, so that you can discuss your concerns.

On the product side, it is true that we've in the meantime discovered a couple of data driven issues that can have negative impact in the sync process. Given the complexity and multitude of sources (devices, clients, external systems) of calendaring data, this is something to be expected in a relatively new product, and also something that one, no matter how much testing is done, cannot be found in QA and with sample data. Real world is different.

We have indeed fixed a good number of these post the ActiveSync 1.0.1 release (and in turn, a good number within that release, over and on top of 1.0.0). It is not possible to release them individually - each of the changes carries some risk, and as they need to go through rigorous regression testing, also in complex interoperability scenarios, it takes us a good amount of time to verify that these changes do what they are supposed to and don't break anything new. This is quite exactly what our QA team is working on as we speak. We are planning to release Scalix 11.4.6 and ActiveSync 1.0.2 later this month (may be a last minute christmas gift actually) and that will combine a substantial number of changes and fixes, as developed to-date.

Cheers,
Florian.

[Jeremy James]

i can understand florians point of having to ask for support points and i can understand natediggs, because i feel the same. the problems listed above i was able to solve all of them myself by sxmboxexp'ing the calendar to a file, using omcontain to wipe out the old calendar and sxmboximp'ing the data back to the calendar.
everything works like a charm after that, but that simply cannot be the solution. if the servlet would be so kind to not simply die with an exception but at least list the ID of the element causing the error, i could simply delete the element or dump it and send it over to you so that you can find out why it contains invalid data

well, since the last calendar crash a week has passed, i hope it lasts a bit and maybe the updated version is available until it happens the next time

[as7805]

I think that our problem has nothing to do with corrupt or miss formated entries. Our exception is a an other one. Most exceptions here are like:

Code: Select all

...
com.scalix.message.formatter.CalendarFormatter.formatMessage(CalendarFormatter.java:265)
...


But we have:

Code: Select all

2009-11-18 17:29:21,248 FATAL [WirelessServlet.doPost:127] SERVLET - deviceId: App..., user: xxx - Uncaught and unhandled exception was reported by the server:
com.scalix.wireless.api.service.PlatformException
   at com.scalix.wireless.api.service.Connection.execute(Connection.java:132)
   at com.scalix.wireless.api.service.PlatformClient.getMessageChanges(PlatformClient.java:654)
   at com.scalix.wireless.controller.command.SyncCommand.doSync(SyncCommand.java:199)
   at com.scalix.wireless.controller.command.SyncCommand.execute(SyncCommand.java:155)
   at com.scalix.wireless.handlers.WirelessRequestImpl.execute(WirelessRequestImpl.java:176)
   at com.scalix.wireless.HttpRequestHandler.handleRequest(HttpRequestHandler.java:138)
   at com.scalix.wireless.WirelessServlet.doPost(WirelessServlet.java:113)
   at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:647)
   at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:729)
...


For me this does not seem to be a message with a kind of format - problem. It would be great to know, what this Exception means.

Best regards,

Alex

[Stefan Dierkes]

In our company we have also problems with Scalix ActiveSync 1.0.1 and the Phone. Our tests revealed, that calendar syncing works with iPhone OS 3.1 but not with iPhone OS 3.1.2. Unfortunately there is no possibility to downgrade a new iPhone (with baseband 06.04) from OS 3.1.2 to 3.1. Therefore Scalix should urgently fix this problem.

I see that there has been no update of Scalix ActiveSync since 31st July 2009. When can we expect a solution?

[natediggs]

1.0.2 is out now, anybody installed it to see if it resolved these issues? I just installed it and will load an old mailbox file that Scalix choked on to see if the issues have been resolved.

[Uluquai]

would also be very interested in experiences with 1.02 as my I'd like to setup a server for my boss who "needs" his iphone desperately

[ndrone1]

I have updated to Activesync 1.0.2 and am still losing my contacts any time I make a significant change on any end (web client, outlook or my iPhone). It's really easy to do - simply update two or three fields in the span of one minute or less and you will lose all of that data (i.e. contacts, calendar, mail) instantly. It will no longer sync back to the device. Each time it happens, the data stays in Outlook and the web client, but won't push to the device any longer. I still don't know how to fix this yet without going back to my previous restore point on vmware. Can someone help me with a better alternative? Glad I haven't tested this out on clients yet!

[Stefan Dierkes]

I still don't know how to fix this yet without going back to my previous restore point on vmware. Can someone help me with a better alternative?

We have not updated to 1.0.2 yet. But my experience with 1.0.1 is that empty calendars on the iPhone can be restored with the following steps:
1. delete the Exchange/ActiveSync profile on the iPhone
2. in Scalix Admin Console (SAC): switch the ActiveSync function of for that user
3. switch the Active Sync on again for that user
4. set up a new Exchange profile on the iPhone
The calendar will now be synched again from Scalix to the iPhone.

[natediggs]

So its pretty clear to me that 1.0.2 doesn't solve any of these problems. What I've realized now after I've lost the data, is that no contacts added to my address book from the phone itself actually make it into the contacts database. I recently reset my phone and reinstalled AstraSync, any contact or calendar item I created on the device was deleted from my calendar/contact store ON THE SERVER causing me to lose all of those entries. I'll restore everything from backup but that behavior is unacceptable and should not happen. I understand that Scalix ActiveSync is a new product and am willing to be understanding of a few issues, but it's also clear to me that it is not ready to be a prime time product and should still be available for free to Scalix customers. I don't really understand why we as Scalix customers are being charged for a product that should be in Beta. I consider problems with parsing data to be issues that should be resolved during testing, not problems that should have to be endured by paying customers of a product. Data loss is not acceptable, ever, IMO.

[Stefan Dierkes]

We have updated to ActiveSync 1.0.2 one week ago and still/again have severe syncing problems:

contacts
- field 'city' is not synced if address tyope is 'business'
- contacts get lost on iPhone after additon of phone numbers
- contacts cannot be added to certain groups (e.g. 'Geschäftlich')

calendar
- adding or editing a meeting sends it with +1 hour shifted meeting time to the attendees
- accepted invitations are send twice with wrong time (+1 hour)
- serial meetings get lost or doubled after several time shiftings of a single metting occurence

[Uluquai]

Hi, just wanted to mention again that CalDAV iPhone -> Scalix is working damn well!

You get ALL calendars that exist in your account and so far no issues.

Really great that Scalix supports CalDAV so well.

I only got 1 user having trouble with contacts. For this one I've set up a really dirty workaround but it works.
Sync his Outlook profile with a syncml server and use the IMHO great synthesis syncml client on the iPhone.

That way he also gets Tasks... so far working well since a week. Of course this is no solution to the current problems and a very failure prone approach, but for the time being with only a handful of users it might be an option.
We are also testing notify on demand for those users having trouble syncing with the current version of scalix active sync. They offer a 30days free trial at the moment.
We are looking forward to using that service until we get ActiveSync working for those users..

[Jeremy James]

Hi, just wanted to mention again that CalDAV iPhone -> Scalix is working damn well!

i really believe you that your solution is working well, but my customer payed around 600 euros for scalix with activesync plus costs for me for integrating the active sync connector and the result is, that it simply is still buggy and there is hardly a week where i am not either deleting a mail or some calendar or contact entry for him because the wireless application crashes leaving tons of exceptions in the tomcat logs. its frustrating that some malformed spam message is able to crash the application.

i think we can expect scalix to work on this application a bit more as i am running out of arguments why scalix is better than exchange

here a nicely mixed excerpt from recent logs causing the iphone to have the contacts and calender entries only occasonally available

Code: Select all

2010-02-06 15:20:38,326 ERROR [HtmlUtils.htmlToText:72] Unable to parse HTML
org.w3c.dom.DOMException: INVALID_CHARACTER_ERR: An invalid or illegal XML character is specified.
        at org.apache.xerces.dom.CoreDocumentImpl.createAttribute(Unknown Source)

2010-02-02 12:50:13,991 ERROR [SyncCommand.outputBodySnippet:1379] COMMAND - deviceId: mmm, user: xxx SYNC - HTML message could not be converte
d to plain text - message:000242e49745039e
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at java.io.StringReader.<init>(Unknown Source)
        at com.scalix.wireless.utils.HtmlUtils.htmlToText(HtmlUtils.java:58)

2010-02-01 08:30:21,729 FATAL [WirelessServlet.doPost:127] SERVLET - deviceId: mmm, user: xxx- Uncaught and unhandled exception was reported b
y the server:
com.scalix.wireless.api.service.PlatformException
        at com.scalix.wireless.api.service.Connection.execute(Connection.java:132)
        at com.scalix.wireless.api.service.PlatformClient.getMessageAsMime(PlatformClient.java:355)

d be returned: org.apache.catalina.connector.ResponseFacade@1ae2896
2010-01-29 18:19:40,932  WARN [WirelessRequestImpl.readRequestBody:265] SERVLET - deviceId: mmm, user: xxx- Wbxml content could not be parsed
org.xmlpull.v1.XmlPullParserException: Illegal input format (position:START_DOCUMENT null)
        at com.scalix.wireless.utils.ActiveSyncParser.exception(ActiveSyncParser.java:626)


[Uluquai]

Of course you are right, I'm in the same boat as you.
We are currently finishing migration to Scalix which wasn't smooth at all, because there were many problems with defective items copied from the previously used hosted exchange accounts..
And then those problems with ActiveSync appeared.
I also got asked the question why not exchange in the first place.. I told them that a similar setup they have now with Scalix, would have cost about 9000USD with exchange, because of extra hardware costs, licensing and setup costs (they don't have a windows domain).

But anyway, I just wanted to mention that, regarding the lost of info on the iPhones, I had some success disabling/re enabling activesync for those users once nightly via a cronjob.
For one iPhone user this worked flawlessly..

BTW: I'm eagerly awaiting the next (bugfix) release, which should arrive quite soon(?). Let's hope that it will address most of those issues.

[PrisonMind]

hey...

--snip---
I had some success disabling/re enabling activesync for those users once nightly via a cronjob.
--snip---

have you got a idea what this exactly do? did this command delete/create a type of cache or something like that?

[Uluquai]

I have absolutely no idea.
It seems to me that something's reset when doing that and that data previously missing is pushed again to the phones..