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I'm trying to help out a client on this one. He has a SharePoint calendar in a Team Site opened in Outlook and wants to copy certain events from his personal calendar to the SharePoint calendar. This was working fine before they added a few custom columns to the SharePoint calendar. Now he is getting this message whenever he drags an event into the SharePoint calendar:

When copying one or more items to this SharePoint List, any incompatible content will be removed during the next synchronization. The original version of each affected item will be preserved in the Local Failures folder, Do you want to continue? [Yes] [No]

Unfortunately, this isn't just a warning; the items don't end up in the SharePoint calendar. What is the "next synchronization"? Also, where on earth might this Local Failures folder be? We can't find it anywhere.

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3 Answers 3

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"Next synchronisation" will be the next time Outlook gets/pushes stuff to SharePoint I'm guessing - normally next time a Send/Receive is done. Outlook can't store any stuff stored in extra columns in the SharePoint Calendar, so maybe it's warning you of this.

Slightly related, I wrote some VBA many, many moons ago which automatically pushed Outlook Calendar Items to a SharePoint list, if it's of any interest.

http://cid-c0f61214d82ac938.office.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/ClientVBA.txt

I should probably point out that this was written for Office 2007 & WSS 3.0...

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Local Failures will be a folder in Outlook, Mailbox->Sync Issues->Local Failures (if, Sync Issues is not visible click on "Folder List" button at the bottom on the "Navigation Panel" to show all folders).

I get the warning too when I copy paste from Outlook Calendar to Sharepoint Calendar, but the copy happens successfully and I see my appointments in Sharepoint.

Since you mentioned the issue started after custom columns were added to the calendar, could you provide more details on these custom columns like:
- What is the Type?
- Are they mandatory?
- Any special permissions on the calendar?

I added a test column of type Text and set Mandatory to true, but that didn't break Outlook Sync. So I am guessing it's something more unique. Let us know if the Local Failures throw some light.

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  • I'm checking on what the columns are; I'm not at the client today. As I remember, there were two new columns, neither mandatory, and some new values for the Category column.
    – Marc D Anderson
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 21:00
  • Hi Mark, Since you mentioned 'Category' I just added another column called 'Category' and type 'Choice' in my test calendar. Now when I copied an outlook event to Sharepoint I got the error in outlook. But strangely enough I can see the even in Sharepoint too. I think we are narrowing this down.
    – sumitkm
    Commented May 12, 2011 at 23:52
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It is possible that 'category' is a reserved column that they didn't lock down (like the doctype fiasco) for a calendar or a system field in outlook since you can grant categories to your events in outlook and the column you created in SharePoint is confusing the process. As far as grabbing the local failures, it was mentioned above by using the 'Folder list' icon (looks like a folder) you can look inside it for Conflicts, Local Failures, and Server Failures. If you really want to be certain of what the real error is - use Fiddler2 on your machine and try to sync...you can look at the log in Fiddler and it will tell you the server response when you attempt to sync the items.

Also note that calendar items with attachments may cause you some gried because the attachments are uploaded with their title being referenced in the URL (so titles of attachments in a calender event have a gazillion restrictions on not using special characters, double periods, periods at beginning or end of filename, etc) and that may have an effect on what you are doing as well.

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  • Thanks, Brendan. I'm leaning toward thinking that Category is the issue as well. I'm going to try to have them delete the Category column in the Sharepoint list and try one with a different name.
    – Marc D Anderson
    Commented May 14, 2011 at 4:38

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