stable outlook connector ?

[Albrecht Dreß]

Am Mittwoch 14 April 2010 11:56:11 schrieb Thomas Krause (Webmatic):
> 1) WinXP german with all patches, Outlook 2003, latest
> bynari connector: Outlook hangs occasionally when synchronising
> with the server. User B doesn't sees dates inserted by User A
> 
> 2) WinXP/Win7 german with all patches, Outlook 2007, second
> last version: calendar entries multiply and stop working
> Outlook. This is maybe fixed in the latest version.

These two effects can be related to a corrupted Outlook PST file.  We use the Toltec connector and see similar issues.  The way to fix the problem with Toltec (so I don't know if it does also apply to Bynari) is usually:
- stop Outlook
- locate the application SCANPST.EXE from your Office/Outlook installation, and run it on *all* PST files (including local ones) the users uses
- start Outlook, and issue a synchronisation with the server
- sometimes it may be necessary to locally erase all shared resources (not it's contents of course...), re-start Outlook, and sync again.

Apparently (what I hear from many suppliers of Outlook add-ins) the reason is that the plug-in interface to Outlook is neither well-defined nor stable.  Things *may* work more or less if you have exactly one single single add-in, but as soon as you have more than one, you're in trouble.  Expect crashes of Outlook, and corruption of the PST files which then needs to be repaired as above.

We are also *very* unhappy with Toltec (anyone out there who has experiences with Konsec??), so the real remedy will probably only be a stable Kontact-for-Win release.  Unfortunately, the current one isn't usable either.  Maybe Kolabsync for Thunderbird is an alternative, but the current nightly build has issues, too.

Apart from that, the shared mechanism in Kolab *does* work just fine.  Absolutely no problems, also using a huge shared calender and contacts folder for >30 users with Toltec/Outlook, with the latest Kontact releases on Windows, and only "cosmetics" with Horde.

Hth,
Albrecht.