Problem with First Name and Last Name mixup

[genesys]

I have a problem with Plaxo which is getting the better out of me. I have two outlook 2003 sync points, on two different PCs. The regional setting on the PCs are different, one is English and the other is non-English. Outlook on the latter PC is used to synchronize with a symbian mobile and a WM5 device. The synchronization is always one-way, from Outlook to these devices. Plaxo client is now 3.6.1.3 on both PCs. Some of the contacts have non-english characters.

The problems:

* first and last names of some of contacts get mixed up after synchronization (i.e. John Doe turns into Doe John). This now happens almost on every synchronization, each time with a random number of contacts and with different contacts. This also leads to changes to the File-as field in Outlook, as well as duplicate birthday entries in Calendar.

* sometimes, after synchronization, some of calendar entries have changed start and end times. The change is always minus 1 hour (i.e. the correct time is 10:00, which gets corrected to 9:00).

Has anyone managed to solve these problems? I have searched the forum and found out that other people have reported the calendar time shift, and some had problems with names, but there were no suggestions from Plaxo on this.

[bryan]

I can have someone work in greater detail with you offline, but I have a couple of questions first -

1. Are your two PC's set to have different Outlook "File As" formats? In other words is "John Doe" on one PC set to display as "Doe, John" on the other PC? If so, this might cause the problem that you're describing as currently we will try to synchronize the File As fields, so if you modify the "Doe, John" contact, it will send its File As up to Plaxo which will then get sent down to the other one.

2. If you click on the Full Name button inside the Outlook contact window, are the First and Last names still in their correct places? We haven't seen any cases where the First and Last names are actually switched inside the broken-out fields.

3. We had some issues with the one-hour time shift in earlier versions, however these should all be fixed with the most recent versions of Plaxo. Are your two PC's set to use the same timezone? And which timezone is your Plaxo Online account set to use? Also, please be sure to install the Microsoft patches for the recent daylight savings time changes.

[genesys]

Hi Brian,

here are the answers:

1) no, both PCs have same File as format (set in Tools/Options/Contact options, default "file as" format: "Last, First").

2) no they are not. If the correct entry is First Name John, Last name Doe, after sync it will be First Name Doe, Last name John

3) both PCs and Plaxo online are set to GMT+1. I believe MS patches were installed beginning of this year, I will look into it.

Maybe you have misunderstood me - I do not edit the contacts that change, it happens by itself on different contacts. I have now switched both PCs to same regional settings, after 2 synchronizations I haven't noticed any problems (yet).