syncing .ics calendars

[RLS92008]

I'm doing a trial of your application to see if it fits my needs, and for the most part it works well. But I do have a couple of problems I can't seem to solve.

I have several .ics calendars that are located on our network, and are used by multiple users and in differing applications. Therefore, I need full 2 way syncing with these .ics files. So far, the best method I've gotten VueMinder to do is set up the calendars and select both subscribing and publishing to the same file for the calendar. This works fairly well, but has a couple of problems.

First, changes made to existing events from other applications do not show up in VueMinder. If I change the event name, times, etc. VueMinder just won't ever pick up the change. Now when I first create an event in another app, VueMinder picks it up and reflects the new event just fine; it just won't show changes made to existing items already being shown. Oddly, though, if I don't have publishing selected, it WILL pick up those changes; but then any changes made in VueMinder don't get pushed back to the file for the other users/programs to use, so that won't work for me.

And the second problem I am seeing is that when you delete the last event in a calendar from the other apps, VueMinder doesn't pick that up. Any events deleted prior to the last one, VueMinder sees and reflects the deletion just fine. But if you delete the very last thing in a calendar, VueMinder doesn't reflect that change.

I don't know if these are issues with the program, or just me not understanding the app and not using it properly. Any help would be appreciated.

[VueSoft]

Hi RLS92008, welcome to the forums. Unfortunately, the publish+subscribe feature is compatible only with other VueMinder installations. The reason is due changes made by other programs not being consistently time-stamped in a manner that allows VueMinder to determine whether the remote updates are more recent than the local data.

VueMinder assigns time-stamps to its changes, so other installations of VueMinder that are both publishing and subscribing to the same ICS file can determine how to sync the changes. Some local changes could be more recent than the ones in the ICS file, and vice-versa. The time-stamps help VueMinder figure out how to deal with the changes.

Unfortunately, I can't think of any easy workaround. You can subscribe to an ICS file that is created by other programs, and that will work fine. You can also publish to an ICS file from VueMinder and have other programs subscribe to that file, which will also work fine. However, if you combine these features, then VueMinder will only sync properly with changes made by other installations of VueMinder.