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Appointments and Meetings |
  
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Appointments and Meetings |
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Appointment Synchronization
Appointments obey special rules for synchronization. Typically, calendars are filled with past appointments that are not really of interest for the obvious reason that they have already occurred. Relationships in Add2Exchange by default are configured to synchronize only appointments that occur today or going forward. However, relationships can also be configured to synchronize historical appointments. Consult your administrator on your relationship settings.
In any configuration, appointments that have been synchronized to a destination folder are not removed by Add2Exchange after they are no longer actively synchronized. This means that there remains a historical record of appointments that have been synchronized by Add2Exchange. The only difference is that changes to such appointments are no longer synchronized between source and destination.
Recurring Appointments
Recurring appointments are a special item type in Exchange and operate by different rules than normal appointments. While Add2Exchange does synchronize recurring appointments, Exchange has some limitations that affect synchronization.
First, a folder can only contain a certain number of recurring appointments. The limit is large enough that most users do not need to know about it, but it does pose a concern when multiple calendars are being consolidated into one, since this calendar will end up with more recurrences than are typical. Calendars that have a long history may also encounter this limit. It is a good practice for your administrator to periodically archive and remove appointments past a certain age. This policy has to be determined by the needs and requirements of your organization.
Second, Exchange can only perform a certain number of copies of recurring appointments. Again, the limit is large enough that most users do not need to be know about it, but it can become an issue for synchronization on systems with a large number of recurring appointments or relationships, because synchronization attempts to copy the recurrences and can hit the limit.
In an effort to minimize the chance that Add2Exchange will hit this limit, Add2Exchange tries to avoid unnecessarily processing recurrences. Recurrences are only synchronized if the recurrence starts after the global recurrence cutoff date. This setting is found in the Global Options menu. By default this period is set to one year in the past from today.
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Warning It is strongly recommended that your administrator leave the global recurrence window at the default if you have even a modest number of recurring appointments. Due to the limitations in Exchange, all synchronization of such items may fail if the limit of recurrence copies is reached, which is inevitable over long periods of uptime of your Exchange server. While the recurring copy count can be reinitialized, doing so requires downtime for your Exchange server. |
Meetings and Invitations
When synchronizing calendars, if a meeting invitation from one of the source folder owners is sent to a destination folder owner, then when both the recipient accepts the invitation and synchronization occurs, there will appear to be two copies of the meeting in the destination folder. The first is the meeting as accepted by the recipient. The second is the Add2Exchange copy of the meeting as it appears in the source folder.
Technically speaking, both of these are separate items, even though they both represent the same meeting. One is the meeting participant's version, which may contain notes, a reminder or other details. The second is the meeting organizer's version, which may contain its own details. Because the organizer's items are synchronized to the participant's calendar, the participant may think there is duplication. The autopopulation feature discussed in the section Synchronization Models helps to distinguish the items.
If you don't want the multiple versions of the item to appear in the destination, the simplest solution is to simply appear on the invitation list of the meeting. Participants may be notified of the meeting by a regular email instead.
