Workaround for iPhone Birthday Sync issue

Daniel Nashed  30 September 2010 22:33:34

I have an update for the Traveler Birthday and Anniversary issue.
The problem behind the issue that Apple changed the format of the date for the Birthday and Anniversary field without telling anyone.
They previously stored it with a fixed time and now convert it to the timezone of the device.
This change has been introduced in iOS4 without letting anyone know.
IBM is trying to figure out what the best way is to fix this issue and this depends on what Apple will do on their side to help.

In the mean time the best way to avoid issues with timedates changed when syncing from the device back to Domino (the date is switched to one day earlier) is to disable the sync of the Birthday and Anniversary field in the mapping database.
This change is for all devices not just for Apple devices. IMHO this temporary change is better than having issues with Birthdays.

You have to open the traveler/map/R6PersonMap.nsf database and find the right document.
Than you have to select skip for the property field as shown below.

After changing those settings you have to close the database and restart the Traveler servertask.

Note: When you update Traveler this change is overwritten and you have to enable the same change again.

I think this is a good and easy to implement workaround until we get a fix.
Again this is much more an Apple issue than a Traveler issue and also happens with other solutions.

-- Daniel





Update:

Even this problem is clearly an Apple issue IBM provides a fix in Traveler 8.5.2.2 and later.
The Traveler server checks the timezone of the device and even there is no timezone information in each individual entry Traveler will interpret the dates based on the timezone information for each device.
The associated ARPA is LO58581: IPHONE BIRTHDAYS CREATED EAST OF GMT, SHOW ONE DAY EARLY

So beginning with 8.5.2.2 you don't need the modification of the maps database any more.
Just install the update and it should overwrite the mapping database.
Take care the mapping databases are replicas even you install a new version on the same or a different server!

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