[missing-sync-hiptop-talk] A couple of bugs/workarounds for a new user

[Rod Morehead]

Brian, thanks for the quick and professional response. I will take the 
rest of the support interaction off the list.

I hope you don't mind my sharing what I found with the mailing list in 
my previous email. I just wanted to ensure that others had the results 
of my workaround findings since it isn't easy to figure out why a sync 
fails.

Although I have been disappointed that my initial experiences have 
uncovered some issues, I do think the Missing Sync for Hiptop is a 
useful product. It is a relatively new product, but with good support 
and bug fixing I'm sure these issues will be resolved.

In general, there are probably two types of users buying this product:

    1. Longtime Hiptop users. These people primarily have their data on 
the hiptop, so I suspect the product works very well from the start 
since the data already conforms to the more restrictive Hiptop data model.

    2. Long time iCal, Address Book, iSync users like myself. These 
people have more heterogeneous data and probably have more issues.

So here are some resulting requests:

    1. First and/or Last name required should minimally be a doc issue. 
There may be a way to have Missing Sync handle it (by populating the 
last name field from the company name as a part of sync), but it may be 
more trouble than it is worth in terms of confusing users and making 
sync even more complicated. Perhaps a warning or informational message 
when such records are found and then no attempt is made to transfer them 
to the hiptop servers.

    2. A agree 100% with your analysis of the chain of events when 
importing iCal data. I think it is unfortunate that iCal doesn't give 
you some control over the GMT offsets to time zone names conversion. I 
think it would make sense for MarkSpace to:

       a. Add code to attempt to "normalize" time zones into what Danger 
wants.

       b. Request an enhancement from Danger to support standard time 
zones and GMT offsets.

       c. Submit a bug to Apple to keep the GMT offset and not 
"normalize" into a time zone (America/Dawson does not mean the same 
thing as GMT offsets). I can try and submit this bug as well, but I 
think the odds are pretty low of this getting fixed by Apple. I agree 
that it is lousy that exchange seems to operates in GMT offsets only.

    3. As an enhancement I'd like to see some consideration given to 
recovery from failed first syncs since, in my environment, they seem to 
result in subsequent syncs sometimes deleting records. Minimally a 
warning to back up (or an offer to script the same) might be a good 
idea. Another approach might be to offer to "reset sync clients" if the 
there is no good sync on record.

    4. I am also having ongoing issues with iCal event records getting 
duplicated into the Unfiled calendar in iCal. I would be happy to share 
my iCal and Address Book data with MarkSpace if it would help to 
reproduce this issue.

Thanks,

--Rod Morehead
  rmore at rmore.net

Brian M. Criscuolo wrote:
> Rod,
>
> I'm sorry you're having problems getting the sync to work correctly. 
> Hopefully we can get it to work correctly, or at least address the 
> issues you have in a productive way.
>
> A couple notes, from your report:
>
>> Problem: Address Book record sync failure caused by a contact without 
>> a firstname or a lastname will cause a sync error. This includes 
>> "company" contacts.
>>
>> Workaround: Copy the company name into the last name field.
>>
>
> You're right, that does happen, and I regret that it wasn't noticed 
> during testing.
>
> It seems that the hiptop API doesn't like records with no first or 
> last name.
>
>>
>> Problem: iCal record sync failure caused by less common timezones in 
>> calendar events. The uncommon time zone often occur in iCal (ics) 
>> files exported from Outlook and later subscribed/imported into iCal.
>>
>> Workaround: Replace with some more common timezones in .ics file.
>>
>>    Examples (original which caused failure -> replacement):
>>
>>        America/Dawson ->US/Pacific
>>
>>        Africa/Abidjan -> GMT
>>
>
> I looked at the time zone settings in the hiptop desktop interface. 
> They most definitely do not support a full set of time zone names, nor 
> do they use standard naming conventions for time zones. This is likely 
> the problem. The sync code simply sets the time zone to what is coming 
> out of the desktop event data, which *should* match up to danger's. 
> Evidently it does not.
>
> I suspect that when the data was exported from Outlook, it never had a 
> true time zone set - only GMT-# - just saving the offset from GMT. 
> When it was imported into iCal, the first match, alphabetically, was 
> chosen. I know for sure that on OS X, America/Dawson is the first time 
> zone at GMT-7 (or -8, if PDT). That's a big problem in applications 
> that I'm seeing - they just don't do time zones well (or at all).
>
> b