[playbook97]

Like many of you I blindly installed the DM upgrade to DM7 without giving a thought to checking the forums for potential problems and, of course, ran into the same issues that have been posted here on CB.

The only thing that DID work for me was with DM7 I was able, finally, to back up my PB. That said, syncing to Outlook did not work at all.

My situation is as follows: I use my Bold 9700 for everything...contacts, calender, email, everything. Outlook is my hard copy backup in case my Bold dies and I need to access my data. With OS2, I was disappointed that my Bold data could not be easily "ported" into the PB's native calender and contact list but figured that syncing through Google would be an easy enough solution. Of course, with the sync problems with DM7 this also proved difficult at best and then there is the problem of duplicate and triplicate entries after any successful sync.

The issue seems to be the way Blackberry and Outlook handle recurring events, particularly those events that are for a full day, like birthdays and anniversaries. Without going into the mechanics of why these systems conflict, here is what I have done so far to get the thing go work. By the way, this sync problem happens on IOS and Android as well as BlackBerry.

So,

1. On my Bold I deleted all my yearly recurring full day events and replaced them with yearly recurring one-half hour entries. Note that if you enter a new contact on your BB and record a birthday for the contact, this date will be automatically entered into your calender as a yearly recurring full day event. You should immediately locate this entry in your calender and replace it with a one hour or one half hour yearly recurring entry. Delete the event that was automatically created when you input your contact.

2. I stopped my Outlook from syncing to Google calender, deleted my Google calender and deleted my Google account on my Playbook.

3. Next, I did a one way sync of ONLY my calender from my Bold to Outlook replacing everything on the Outlook calender with the data on my BB.

4. Restarted the Outlook to Google calender and reinstalled Gmail onto the Playbook.

After about 10 minutes all entries on my BB were exactly reproduced onto the native Playbook calender and no duplicates.

BlackBerry > Outlook > Google > Playbook

In theory, this should work with a two way sync and I will try that out later but, for now it gets the job done and seems to solve the freeze at "preparing sync preview". We'll see.

I don't care to have my contacts syncing through Google so I will just get them to sync with Outlook. I will see how that works out tonight.

Using: BB Bold 9700 (OS 5), Playbook OS2, Outlook 2003, Windows XP PRO.

Hope this helps some folks.

[playbook97]

Tonight I did a one way sync of my BB contacts to Outlook. In configurations, I disabled the birthday field and the sync went fine.

Also did two way sync for tasks and notes and those were perfect.

Finally, did a sync of all four categories at once:
Contacts > Outlook
Calender > Outlook
Tasks <> Outlook
Memos <> Outlook

All completed without problem in less than a minute. No hanging whatsoever or freeze.

[eds817]

Since OS2 and native PIMs I migrated everything to Gmail.

I setup two Gmail accounts on my 9900 as IMAP and configured them to sync my contacts & calendar. I have the same accounts on my PlayBook. So now my PlayBook and 9900 are in sync. To sync Gmail with Outlook I installed a program called Sync2. Now all three are in perfect sync.

I now use DM just to backup my 9900.