It’s been a couple months since we switched to Exchange and I wanted to give an update on how things were going, most particularly oddities I’ve seen. In a nutshell, I’m just running across a cosmetic thing or two with email, but am still stumbling over scheduling calendar events and have some syncing issues.

I’ll take care of the easy one first – email. To recap, I’m using a smart mailbox to coalesce my deskmail and Exchange inboxes and am only sending mail through deskmail. Things are still going well, except every now and then Mail.app’s smart mailbox “new message” count is out of sync with actual new messages.  Going away from the smart mailbox and back corrects that issue. That action also corrects the other thing I’ve been seeing, the message count of the smart mailbox is often way off. Sometimes it’s off by 10 or 20, sometimes by 100. I can deal with both of these cosmetic issues, and hopefully they’ll be fixed in future updates.

Calendaring isn’t smooth sailing for me yet, but at least I feel like I’m mostly there. I’m having a couple syncing issues:

• If I create an entry in Entourage and then somewhat but not very quickly change it (such as dragging to block out a period of time, right click/”Open Event”, edit the event, save), my iCal Entourage calendar will still say “New Event”. Forcing the Entourage calendar to re-sync doesn’t update the event, but if I edit and re-save the event (even if I didn’t actually change anything) will force the event to re-sync to iCal.
• Every now and then my subscribed calendar (the one that goes through the PHP filter to remove “Unavailable” events) won’t show all updates. The actual feed is correct (verified by doing an HTTP query directly to the web server with the PHP filter). Sometimes restarting iCal fixes the problem, but when it doesn’t, I need to delete the calendar and resubscribe.

These issues are more than cosmetic, but again I can deal with them, and they seem likely to be eventually fixed.

I’m having the most issues with actually scheduling events. I’m still at the point where I think it’s a UKI problem (user-keyboard interface) but while I’m not a calendar power user, I like to think I’m relatively adept with other calendar systems (iCal, Google Calendar, Oracle Calendar) and I haven’t had as many problems using them as I do Exchange.

What kind of problems? I’ve scheduled things that have disappeared from my calendar (and I hadn’t deleted the item from my mail folders) which becomes problematic when I’ve also booked other people and a room, since changes become a challenge. Scheduling recurring events is tricky if you accidentally try to book a room for more than a year, since it will decline the invitation – I’m not yet adept at correcting those. The other friction point is I haven’t found a good way to schedule a room which isn’t in my contacts list (although I can if I schedule from Outlook). Fortunately I don’t schedule rooms very often.

Oh, one other thing I’ve seen is it matters how I accept events, at least with Entourage. If I’m looking at my calendar and accept with right click/”Accept”, a copy of the invitation remains in my inbox. If I accept the event while viewing my inbox, then a copy won’t be saved there. It does seem safe to just remove the inbox message if I accept from the calendar, but admittedly I was gun shy to do that at first, not wanting the event to disappear from the calendar.

Most of my issues are related to switching from a calendar based on a central database to one based on messages in mail folders. I’m past the point where things are getting harder (probably because I haven’t tried doing something with Exchange calendar that I haven’t already tried in the past couple months) so I’m still hopeful that things will improve for me.