Why I find active sync frustrating

[jlc, just jlc]

First of - as a long time Palm user who has dabbled in WinCE since it first came out I have a bias to the way Palm does things. When the 700w came out, the prospect of faster connections via EVDO once again pulled me to the other side of the force.

So I installed Active Sync - turned off firewalls, AntiVirus by disabling their startup and rebooting. No connection - device recognized by no sync connection. Finally, after a long and helpful call to Palm support we discovered that AS sometimes fails to bind the TC/IP stack it needs - once we opened the Mobile Device network connections and checked the right bindings, AS worked. Great.

Got home, wanted to sync with my desktop (I had setup a partnership with my laptop). Fixed the connection bindings, device connected but only as a Guest. Did some digging, discovered the Active Sync folder on my desktop was read only - changed the attribute, resync'd and - came up as Guest - AS reset the attributes.

Uninstalled and reinstalled aS - no change. More digging revealed that a Reg Key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows CE Services - Key is GuestOnly and must be set to 0 (off) instead of 1 (on)) must be changed. Did that, and no I have a partnership with my Treo - but I can't sync Outlook because it is already set to sync with Outlook in my laptop. Since both use our MS Exchange server they will have similar info - I just want to keep my Treo up to date and have to chose which device I will use, which is a pain because I use the laptop on the road and desktop at home.

Man, I really miss Hotsync's ability to connect and sync to multiple machines.

[Janak Parekh]

I'm sorry to hear about your troubles, and yes, we've been ranting on AS's poor support of multiple-machine sync for some time. :( I do want to point out that the out-of-box AS experience isn't usually this bad (my AS 4.1 install just worked the first time), and pairing it with Exchange server sync, if possible, reduces the need for multiple-machine sync.

Also, things like "continuous sync" are, in my opinion, an improvement over Hotsync.

--janak

[PPCMD]

I can load the apps onto my Treo 700w, but in to get my data to sync I have to turn off the FW. Hopefully the MAC sync apps will be out soon so I can move back to my MAC to sync.

[Janak Parekh]

I can load the apps onto my Treo 700w, but in to get my data to sync I have to turn off the FW.
Yes, this is a common AS 4.x occurrence. Your best bet may be to enable certain rules to avoid having to turn off the firewall (e.g., allow traffic from 169.254.* and/or on certain ports).

[Rod3]

I never had a problem syncing to two computers. Is this something new? I would be asked if I wanted to sync to just this computer or to two when setting up. This was, of course, with ActiveSync 3. I think a lot of things seem to be different. For example, why is scheduling greyed out on my Sync when I'm syncing the Treo? It's not the same setup as my other devices, which have "options" where you can set up scheduling. The Treo doesn't sync continuously, like my other machines; it just makes that annoying little sync sound about every five minutes or so, and resyncs. Is this normal for WM5? My other machines still work just fine.