I had previously encountered problems syncing calendar appointments from exchange server to my Android phone. I had brushed them off because I could resolved them somehow, though most of the time it’s through factory reset (which in retrospect, is a silly resolution mechanism)

It got worsen recently. Despite umpteen times of factory reset and exchange account settings, I just could not get the calendar appointments to download into my phone.  I noted that the sync did occur, albeit just one-way; Appointments created in the phone are synchronised automatically into Exchange server, but not the other way round.

Googling for help was not easy. For most part of the google search results, it was more of an affirmation that there are people around that experienced the same problem as I did, than a resolution to the problem itself.

Just as when I almost wanted to give up, I came across a post in xda-developers.com, about how the sync issue could be attributed by a corrupted calendar entry.

It sounded silly to me, but I recalled it did happen to me before, back then when I was using Windows Mobile phones. The Windows Mobile Activesync would however highlight the cause of the problem, whereas in the case of Android, nothing is reported and the sync process just start and stop within second, quietly.

Given that I have already exhausted all possible solutions, I figured out there is no harm looking at this possibility. So I moved all my calendar entries in exchange server to a temporary offline folder, before copy them back in batches to narrow down the offending entry that causes the whole synchronisation to fail. Lo and behold!  I managed to find the offending entry, deleted it and the calendar synchronisation process resumed back to normal!

Hopefully this blog would provide some help to folks who encounter similar problem. At least doing google search would yield some results that offer resolution rather than just problem reporting.

Cheers!