Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

Here's my setup: I'm on a Mac (no Microsoft Outlook...too limiting), I created a "dummy" gmail account for just my contacts and calendar to set up as my one exchange account in the N900 as having my main gmail address as the exchange account, with e-mail, contacts and calendar would not sync properly. Others were also having success with this. In other words, one gmail account as exchange with just contacts and calendar and your main e-mail gmail account setup as an imap account. There is currently no iSync possiblility either.

This seemed to work in the beginning. First sync worked, as did subsequent syncs (one way only: to N900) IF I rebooted my device before syncing. Well this slowly stopped working and I'd get the message: "syncronization failed"...repeatedly. I was therefore hopeful that a major update nearly two months after the phone was released would fix this. Nada.

I now get the message: "Exchange server is not responding. Verify that account settings are correct." Perhaps they just changed the language of the error message, or perhaps they've even gone backwards on this. Who knows. Well, somebody knows and they aren't talking.

Surely there is a significant percentage of N900 users with gmail accounts who'd like proper syncing and/or N900 and Mac users. What gives? Why can't this be addressed? Isn't this a basic function?

Don't get me wrong. I love this phone/tablet and all it can do, will do, and should be able to do. But I need this phone/tablet to work properly so I can do my job so I can afford gadgets like this. I have no way of new contacts now, short of entering them both in my computer and the N900 or dragging a vCard over to the N900. Lame. Not to mention the lack of two-way sync.

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

nuevasync?

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

I have the same problem. I was very excited about PR1.1 and it just doesn't work. Has anyone else been able to get it to work? Does one need to delete everything and sync from scratch again?

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

Use nuevasync.... there is a lot of posts here that clarify that google/gmail is not completely exchange compatible

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

I installed Nuevasync today. Lots of error messages even after the initial sync. Server address not found, communication error etc. I'm running the five day pro trial.

A bigger problem though is that contacts are supposed to be merged, so I have one of each contact that includes im, phone, email and other fields. Merging contacts breaks horribly for me using Nuevasync and all contacts appear to be unmerged after sync. I turned off contact syncing alltogether and use it only for calendars. Nice effort though.

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

First "full" sync only synced calendar, then subsequent manual sync worked fine. As normal you should not attempt to sync your google email via exchange.

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

FWIW, I'm coming from a Droid, which had (3) different email clients:

1. Exchange
2. GMail
3. IMAP/POP3

GMail was configured in its own app (IMAP account), which was basically slightly more robust than the native POP3 client. It was not configured with the Exchange specific client, and I only have it working on the 900's "IMAP/POP3" app. (FWIW, its working without issue). GMail app shared some features/settings with the Exchange app, but they were different beasts.

I think that one of the main issues also is that GMail uses "labels" where Exchange uses "folders". As a backup, I have a "bookmark" to my "logged in GMail inbox".

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

Well I believe I found out, syncing works for me up until the moment when I merge my contacts with my IM contacts (msn-haze, msn-pecan seems broken for me). Then calendar-only sync works, but contacts are broken. After a complete resynchronisation it works again, up until the moment when I decide to merge.
I am still in the evaluation period of this discovery and need a couple more hours/days to find out if the sync won't break at some point if I don't merge anything, but I think I found the reason for the sync to give up after a while.

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

google sync is working fine for me with no third party software just the standard exchange on the device with the following settings:
server: m.google.com
port: 443
secure: yes
username: ************@gmail.com
password: *************
domain: empty dont put anything
uncheck "sync email" because that doesn't work other than that contacts and calendar is working fine except one thing i found wrong with the having multiple calendars on your account only the main one gets synced..

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

Mine wasnt working until i do the full resync. Manual sync didnt work, it didnt sync calendar. But after a full resync it did.

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

So I think I figured it out. My sync works up until the moment, where I merge my contacts with my IM-contacts. I tried it with msn-haze and msn-pecan, same result. The sync takes a couple seconds to finish, every time I sync. Once I merged, the sync takes forever and then times out with the well known "check your server details" etc etc.

So merging contacts seems to be the culprit. Respectively merging contacts seems to trigger something harmful to the sync process. Once you do a full resync and do not merge, the sync will continue at least it did for the last couple hours for me.

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

Has anyone raised this as a bug ?

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

I am using Neuvasync to sync up to google as I also had issues with m.google.com and I have merged contacts with skype, jabber, facebook, yahoo and MSN Haze all setup in them and my contacts are syncing perfectly.

With google I found that the sync worked well the first few times but then after a while it just stopped working, I tried neuvasync (3rd party free google sync) it has been working perfectly ever since I set it up with no issues at all.

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

This has been discussed a few times in the main MfE thread and boils down to Google using their own varient of the ActiveSync protocol. Unlike Microsoft, from whom Nokia was able to license specs, Google doesn't appear to offer information on their ActiveSync dialect.

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

I didnt search the bug trackers before posting here nor did I file a bug myself.
I discovered this behavior last night and was able to reproduce the break of sync by merging my phonebook with my IM (msn-pecan) contacts repeatedly. Currently I dont have anything merged and I'd like to observe how the sync behaves without me merging before I file a bug. If it will do well for the next couple days and breaks again once I merge, I can file it as a bug.
But maybe other users can reproduce my findings in the meantime while I wait for my unmerged sync to break again ;-)

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

Not sure if this is related, but I've had trouble with my exchange sync setup too. I'm just syncing the calendar, and for the first week or so in January it was working fine. Now, it won't sync (even if I try manually), and I get that "exchange server not responding" error.

But, if I do a full resync, it works... kinda. The full resync works, up until the very last point when the sync progress bar is *almost* full, and then it hangs. If I cancel it there, I'll have an updated calendar. But normal syncing still fails to work at all (even though it was fine originally), so this full resync and cancel after it hangs is the only thing that works.

Thoughts?

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

I'm sometimes wondering what you expect. Nobody ever announced Google support for PR1.1. Things don't get magically fixed...

See https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6343 (please do not add "me too" comments), please vote for http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...nchronization/ if interested...

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

hey Andre, nice seeing you eyeing around in the forums. You sound a little bit annoyed though :-( Come on, don't despair, you guys are doing a great job! Thanks for the brainstorming link, I voted in there. I find the separate app a good idea, reminds me of the setup I had with Android: the "Exchange" account stays free for a business account to be configured and the GSync (or whatever you'd like to call it) can be used to sync to my personal calendar. So I can have business and private live nicely separated but both kept in sync. Anyway...

@all didnt have to file a bug, bug has already been filed quite some time ago by other members. Obviously it's not bound to MfE-Google, happens with MfE-Exchange 2003 as well and Exchange 2003 should be mostly supported, I thought.

@balleyne If I were you I'd clean out my device and freshly start over. Try this to get around a reflash: delete the MfE configuration and delete the calendar MfE syncs into as well and then reconfigure MfE. In case you dont know where to fiddle around to get this done:
In Settings chose MfE, hit the Settings button and then hit the Delete button. This will remove the MfE account, hope you still have your login details ;-) As for the calendar, before you re-setup MfE, remove the calendar MfE synced into. Open Calendar, get the menu, chose Settings, then chose Edit calendars (1/2/3/x visible) where you will be presented with a list of all calendars on your N900. If you synced into the default N900 one, tap it, chose Delete which will throw security questions at you. Answer then to get the calendar purged since it cannot be fully deleted. If you created a separate calendar and did not sync into the N900 default one, delete that one. It will be marked with "synchronized". This as well will throw security warning at you, answer accordingly to get the calendar removed. Once done, recreate the MfE account. Now, in the final step before the initial synchronisation, set the calendar sync to create a new calendar and not to sync into the N900 default calendar. There is a button in the calendar sync details which lets you change the calendar and/or let the sync create a new one.
Hopefully this will sort things out or at least keep you up to date without any worries for a couple days and/or weeks ;-)

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

Thanks for the advice! Turns out I was able to fix things without totally cleaning it out. When I looked at the calendar sync settings, I noticed the N900 calendar said "synchronized to PC," which doesn't make any sense (all I've done is connect as a mass storage device to my Ubuntu laptop with Bluetooth), but I created a new calendar and set the exchange sync to use that one, and voila—working again!

Thanks!

Re: Disappointing: Google contact & calendar sync over Exchange still not working after Maemo 5 PR1.1 update
 

Heh, probably a bit overworked, as always in the last months which have been an avalanche...
Thanks for voting. :-)