Deleting Past ACT Recurring Activities from Outlook

[mikefm101]

Hi,

At a new job and the new boss sent me a recurring Outlook calendar invite for his weekly call.  The start date for the activity is November of 2013. 

When I synch Outlook to Act, Act of course now loads two years of past activities into the My Contacts activity tab. The call for next Monday isn't shown in my activities tab, but the weekly call from 2013 is. 

I tried:

1. Erasing all the old Act activities and resynching, but they showed up again.
2. Clearing all the old activities by marking them compete, they all still showed up upon the next synch
3. Modifying the OL calendar invite to change the start date to Monday, the next synch Act again showed every week for the past two years.

My manager resent the invite to me in an attempt to start from scratch again, however I cannot adjust the invite start date without first accepting the event, and if I accept the event then it will synch with Act (problem #3 above).

What am I supposed to do with this??  Having two years of past Activities perpetually in Act is not workable. 

If the only solution is NOT synching this particular activity to Act I am OK with that, but I am not clear if that is an option..

Act 2013, Outlook 2010 running Exchange something or other. I am the only Act user in the company.

Thoughts??

Mike  

[phillip]

Stan's Activity Deleter will do this for you I believe:  http://www.adsprogramming.com/products.htm

[mikefm101]

Original poster here with what I ultimately did to correct this.  In the end I:

1. Deleted everything related to this event in Act and Outlook
2. Had my manager send me the outlook invite again, which I accepted.  Act populated with the two years of overdue calls as before.
3. In Outlook I edited the calendar invite to begin next Monday.
4. Also in Outlook, I manually deleted each appearance of the event prior to today.  So about 130 calendar deletions altogether.  It was a bit tedious but only took about ten minutes. 

Deleting the past event appearances in Outlook seemed to do the trick. Act is showing things correctly.  Act synched with the revised start date, and did not see any past activities, so it shows correctly under the My Record Activities tab now.

What troubles me is Act is configured to only synch seven days back from today, but despite that setting it still imported two+ years of an activity.  Maybe I have something set up incorrectly but that setting in Act I would have expected to prevent this whole episode form happening in the first place.  I am wondering if that seven day setting only applies to events created in Act and then pushed to Outlook, not the other way around.  .     

Anyway, maybe it will help someone else....

Mike

[mikefm101]

Never mind, this actually did not work.

The next day, after the sync, Outlook had populated all two years back into its calendar.  I deleted all of them.

Everything looked fine.

Then today Act got populated with several dozen of them, meanwhile the entire event disappeared entirely in outlook, both in the past and the future. 

I had adjusted event start dates in both Act and OL. 

Just bizarre behavior overall. 

Mike

[peter.langston]

Hi Mike,

You're not logged into Outlook integration with the same Outlook profile on multiple pcs are you? I have seen that cause some pretty strange problems.

If not, it could be a problem with the Act Metadata files which store information on which events have already been scheduled so the program knows what to sync and what has already been sync'd.

I would probably call the support team who can troubleshoot your problem and see if this is the cause.

Peter

[jnpurdy]

Just adding my 2 cents worth.

My environment includes Outlook, Exchange, and Microsoft CRM Dynamics.

While I tried to do the Outlook Sync, I also ran into several issues of duplicate entries and unable to delete appointments.

I do not have a solution, but this is how I changed my behavior.

• I do not sync with Outlook
• I do show the ACT db in the E-mail - Outlook Address Books in preferences
• I choose to let Outlook manage all appointments
• Twice a year I delete all the contacts in Outlook and import from an ACT created spreadsheet.
• I do allow accepted meetings to also populate in ACT.  (Hey, Swiftpage, can the same feature be created when creating a meeting in Outlook? - Yes I have posted the request in share your ideas)
• Another reason I use Outlook isolated from synching with ACT is that I use Skype for Business which allows me to set a meeting directly in the incoming eMail and establish credentials for the meeting at the same time. 
• For every profile in ACT that I want in Outlook, I have a field called "Outlook" and either Outlook, Add to Outlook, or noting will appear in that field.  Every new contact automatically defaults to "Add to Outlook". 

Still, the marriage between ACT and Outlook continues to have a hiccup or two, but for the most part, this works just fine for me.

Well, this is my two cents worth, and I generally receive change back.  I do hope it helped a little.

[mikefm101]

John,

Thanks for this...will likely take some of your guidance, especially your fifth bullet point and limiting "integration" to just that.  

Peters comments above reinforce a new strategy as I use Outlook apps on my iPad and iPhone and as he suggests that is probably the root of the issue.

Mike

[mikefm101]

Peter,

Had not thought about this, but excellent point.  I use the Outlook app on my iPhone and iPad, and more than likely that is what is causing the problem as I am logged into those applications.  I had not used the iOS app's before starting this new job a few weeks ago, hence why I was not having issues with my previous Act deployment.  

Really appreciate your pointing this out, had never occurred to me.

Adjusting my strategy as John suggests below. 

Best....Mike