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Adding a contact photo to a contact on iPhone breaks ActiveSync to Exchange

This is a weird one... I have a user who has an original iPhone, we just upgraded her to 2.0 a week ago. She noticed that she lost her contact photos when we replaced her contacts with those stored on exchange. She added them back to the contacts on the phone and everything appeared fine. The problem came when she went to add an email address to a contact (which had a photo). It did not update on the iPhone.

Adding a contact on the iphone synced, and modifying a contact that did not have photo synced. Modifying a contact on the computer (one which was not syncing to phone) synced to webmail, so that part of the sync (desktop to exchange) was working. If you remove the picture, it starts syncing again. Issue persists in 2.0.1.

I will test on a iPhone 3G tomorrow and see if the problem persists on all phones and exchange accounts. Can anyone verify this on their setup? If it is not a problem for you are you using exchange 2007?

Thanks!

Setup:
Exchange 2003 SP2
Entourage 2004
First Gen 8GB iPhone

Workaround:
Either remove photos, or disable active sync for contacts, enable syncservices to sync to OS X address book, and sync via cable.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.4)

Posted on Aug 11, 2008 2:13 PM

Reply
2 replies

Aug 12, 2008 9:41 AM in response to keppie

UPDATE: OK, today I tested with 3G iPhone, and there is no issue at all syncing (in fact, the contact picture appears as an attachment to the contact if viewed in webmail).

I then setup another 1st Gen iPhone to the same exchange server, add a photo to the contact, made a change to the contact, and have the same problem -- no sync after photo added, syncs when photo is removed. I even deleted (from Entourage) a contact that I had added a picture to on the phone, and that change did not go to the iphone until I deleted the photo (Waited about 5 minutes). About 20-30 seconds after deleting the photo on the contact, it recognized that the contact was deleted from the exchange side, and pushed the deletion to the phone where it when poof right before my eyes like it's supposed.

This is kind of baffling since you'd think the software is the same between the first gen and 3G after 2.0, but the problem is very re-creatable for me...]

Aug 19, 2008 4:04 PM in response to keppie

I'm having a similar problem. Previously i had not set the iPhone to synch contacts with outlook, and just had them all stored locally on the phone. In order to back them up before synching with exchange, I told iTunes to sync my contacts with outlook. This copied them all to outlook contacts. I then set up the exchange email to sync contacts, calendars and emails. At this point, all the contacts on the phone were removed, and replaced with what I had in outlook. This unfortunately removed ALL contact photos. I thought that was strange, and tried re-adding the photo from the phone. It added it, and then promptly it removed itself. I tried again, and as soon as i set the photo, it disappeared. I even went into outlook to assign a photo, and the change didn't carry to the phone. What gives? I emailed support, and they dumbly directed me to the Basic iphone info page. useless.

Adding a contact photo to a contact on iPhone breaks ActiveSync to Exchange

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