[MRink]

This seems like it would be a common question, but I didn't find anything when searching. If a different forum would be more appropriate for this, please let me know and I'll move it.

Short version of my question: Why did switching to wireless synch cause all of my Address Book contacts to flood my personal Outlook contacts folder even though most of the contacts are coming from a different Outlook folder?

Brief background: This is a business environment. Exchange. Outlook. BES. Curve 8330.

Everyone in our small business uses Desktop Manager to synch their Tasks, Calendar, and Address book to Outlook, but we'd prefer wireless synch, so I'm testing this out myself as a guinea pig.

My Desktop Manager was set up to synch two address books (personal contacts from my Outlook mailbox and company contacts from an Outlook public folder) and I never really had any problem with this. That is, on the handheld, all of my contacts would be merged into my address book but in Outlook the contacts remained properly segregated between the two folders no matter what amount of editing or synching I did.

Soon after setting myself up for wireless synch, however, my personal contacts filled up with all of the contacts from the public folder. What did I do wrong?

I also happen to have two separate Outlook tasklists mapped to my handheld -- one personal tasklist and one from public folders -- and I'm experiencing the same issue with them. Yet, I have THREE Outlook calendars mapped to the handheld -- one personal and two from public folders -- and those items are behaving themselves just fine. Nothing from the public calendars is ending up on my personal calendar.

Thoughts? Any help is appreciated.

[takeshi]

Wireless sync with multiple folders doesn't work very well in my experience. You're better off with wired sync if that's a requirement. Perhaps others can shed some additional light...

[KOR]

I've run into the same issue in a similar environment (Exchange 2k3, Outlook 2000). I called RIM support and the explanation I got is that the BB keeps a 'master' db of contacts and that's what it uses to determine adds, deletes, etc. Because it's on the BB, it just thinks it should sync back to your personal contacts. Not the answer I was looking for, but understandable. Public Folders are hard just hard to work with. We've come up with 2 pseudo-solutions.

1) Turn off wireless sync for contacts.
This works for anyone who has a computer running Outlook, as they can sync any time they want. It doesn't work for anyone who only has a BB, but needs Public contacts. For these users, on a periodic basis, we delete all the Public contacts from their personal contacts and reload, which is real hassle.

2) Make sure all Public Folder contacts are assigned to a unique Category (Corp Contacts or Personal Contacts), then instruct users to filter by Personal Contacts category unless they need something from Public. Again, a hassle.

If only RIM & MS played nicely together... Public Folder contacts are very useful in large organizations. As far as Public Folder calendar items go, I don't have any experience in that area. We use them, but users don't sync.

Hope this helps a little & good luck.