Old appointments vanishing

[Timebomb]

We have an Exchange Server 5.5, with SP 4 installed. Our CEO accesses it using several different machines, with Outlook 98 through Outlook XP. He also syncronizes to a Palm Pilot. He keeps appointments dating back to 1999. Periodically, older events vanish from his calendar. There is no regularity. All machines have Archiveing turned off. The dates aren't even consecutive. For example, the batch he lost today were:

August 6 to November 13, 2001
January 31 to April 13, 2001
Pre January 21, 2001

I have started to make a weekly export to PST of all his files so that I can quickly recover these, but it does get a bit annoying. Are there any ideas what could be causing this?

Thanks to anyone who can help.
Tom Backus
Network Administrator
Hitchcock Industries
Bloomington, Minnesota.
backust@hitchcockusa.com

 

[brontosaurus]

he's not allowing the Palm to be synch "master", is he? If so, he could be overwriting Outlook from there...

 

[DrWatson101]

I have seen this occur both with vanishing appointments as well as re-appearing appoinments once deleted.

Although the palm could be an issue. In our case the director had multiple machines with calendar information that was different on each.

Mail was set up to synchronize each time he logged into his laptop. This of course changed the information in the message store and changed his appointments in his office PC.

Once you have everything recovered on his office machine, it would probably be easier to blow off his old email profile and create a new one on the remaining machines.

 

[DrWatson101]

One more thing, If your user has offline folders (i.e. *.ost) file you should delete it and create a new one, it will sync with the updated information.

The first sync may take a few minutes but once created the following sync's will run faster. Exchange Administrator/
Desktop Analyst
ADTRAN Inc.
Huntsville AL

 

[Timebomb]

Thanks. It is going to be awhile before I can test things, but I bet it is the sync issue. He has three machines, Home, office, and laptop. Sometimes he doesn't turn on the laptop for several weeks, or months. I would bet the problems occur whenever he reattaches the laptop.

Thanks for the help! Tom Backus
Network Administrator
Hitchcock Industries
Bloomington, Minnesota.
backust@hitchcockusa.com

 

[Guest_imported]

I have had it in the past that if there is a change to a re-occuring appt., the appt. will get corrupt and not show up anymore yet it will remain in re-occuring appointments. Re-create the appointments and delete the old one and this may help. Good Luck.