iPhone, Outlook Calendar and Synchronization

What a disastrous couple of days......
I noticed by chance a couple of days back that an appointment I had entered into my calendar on outlook was not synchronizing with the iPhone Calendar.
The appointment was a little unusual in that it recurred same day, same time for a full year, but not that unusual.

After a few failed attempts to re-synchronize and to use the "Replace" option under the advanced options for the iPhone Calendar




Still no joy and mounting frustration. Then I decided to restore the iPhone and delete all the information thinking if I just reloaded the calendar from scratch this would solve the problem. All this did was leave me with an empty calendar. Meanwhile all the other synchronizations were working - the contacts, music, bookmarks etc

Searching the web for terms like "outlook events not syncing 2007 itunes xp" provided some useful links and this link on the Get Satisfaction site proved most useful

My iPhone calendar will not sync with Outlook 2007

Halfway down was an extended list of actions suggested by Bled Edge that provided some helpful guidance but what was a missing was an underlying cause. Different solutions had worked for different people and no real explanation of what was going on. Was it an iPhone problem, was it Outlook/Microsoft and why was it occurring.

I had the fortune of access to another iPhone to try that was loaded with the same version of firmware and was clean, almost new. When I tried this it failed to sync the calendar but everything else synchronized.

I created a new Outlook profile and copied all the information across from the old profile but still no success. But the mistake here was copying in full the appointments from one Outlook pst file to the new one.

I believe the problem is caused by a rogue appointment in outlook. No idea which one or why but it prevents any further appointments form being synchronized and if the time it takes to synchronize is giving any in indication I would say the software is actually synchronizing but the results are not showing (see below for more evidence of that)

Since creating a new outlook profile is not small task I decided instead of doing this all over again I would delete all my appointments (a big challenge because I have a lot of invites and each of these wanted to send a cancellation - quick fix, let the cancellation notices be created but make sure outlook does not automatically send e-mail and then delete all the outgoing messages before they are sent)

Then I copied a few appointments to the empty calendar and created one new one. This time the iPhone calendar synchronization worked..... but interestingly I believe there was more appointments than I had in my outlook calendar which leads me to believe they were there (despite my calendar showing it was empty) and when the synchronize finally worked then the appointments that had been previously sent showed up.

Careful copying of appointments and re synchronization at various intervals allowed me to create a working copy of my calendar on my iPhone and now I am left with the task of cleaning up the calendar and checking for omissions.

Other steps that could work if I am right include using the outlook PST Scan tool (scanpst), exporting all your appointments and re-importing them and creating a new profile that does not have all the appointments copied across.

Hope this helps someone