Currently, most of our support tickets are Windows desktop sync related. Microsoft makes sure that they will be in business for long time by messing up Windows component on each OS update. There is no compatibility whatsoever. We are acting like Microsoft support.
Anyway, the issue is interesting. In our desktop Outlook/iCal sync program, your host comptuer will act like a “Server” and will broadcast the signal for iPhone to pick it up. Basically, your host computer is on the local networking and is broadcasting the message in the network, for example “I am here, please connect to me and synchronize the tasks with Outlook/iCal on this computer, any iphone out there?”.
In some local networking, it doesn’t allow broadcasting at all. So iPhone really couldn’t locate the host computer. What our guys figured out is that we are going to add peer-to-peer network connections. So if the local networking doesn’t allow broadcasting on host computer, you can locate the ip address (In most cases, the host computer will use DHCP to get ip dynamically). Then on the iPhone, if auto-scan on host computer isn’t working due to no broadcasting from host computer, the user can type in the host computer ip address directly, and it will establish peer-to-peer connection. So iPhone and Outlook/iCal can connect to each other and transfer data back and forth.
We are developing it now, it will be included in the upcoming v2.1 update.
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