Prior to my last job change I used SyncMyCal to keep my Google calendar in sync with my Palm TX and my desktop.  Unfortunately that didn't work when I moved as SyncMyCal doesn't like Outlook 2000. 

Recently I finally upgraded to Outlook 2003 and that allowed me to start using SyncMyCal again.  Unfortunately my calendars had all become so hosed in the interim that I had to manually fix a lot of the data. 

First I started with Outlook.  Thanks to Brien Posey's post, http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid43_gci1243815,00.html, I was able to take care of some unruly recurring appointments that had grown very large.  I literally had to delete hundreds of duplicate recurring appointments. 

Then I moved on my Palm.  I didn't remove anything from my palm manually.  I hoped that it would pick up all the deletions.  Well it picked up the recurring deletions but many ghosts had popped up in the meanwhile.  By ghosts I mean recurring appointments that had been slightly altered and now were no longer recurring.  But I still had about 40 duplicates here and there.  So I synched the palm, those duplicates were pushed back into Outlook.  I removed them in Outlook and then synched again.  The exorcism was complete and the ghosts were eliminated.

Finally to my google calendar.  Unfortunately it had become so damaged that I couldn't even interact with it.  I would attempt to delete an appointment.  It would disappear from my view but would tell me that an error had occurred and that I should try it again later.  If I refreshed the page, then the deleted appointment would still remain. 

For this move, I had to use the big guns.  I simply deleted the entire calendar and recreated it.  Then I synched via SyncMyCal.  This worked like a dream and I am now back up and running again. 

Tags: outlook, palm, synchronization, syncmycal