Question regarding contact links

[sbarber5]

Hello forum, first time poster here. I come to you for sage wisdom I cannot find anywhere else on the vast internet.

Please let me preface by saying that all my links used to be appear with just the full name of the linked contact.

I recently blew out my profile and started from scratch. I set up the same exact exchange account along with another exchange account that had not previously been installed (that is the only change).

All of my original contacts are now linking in a very odd manner and including the Company Name in the link. This whether it is a new birthday or anniversary or linked to another contact or anything.

New contacts are not behaving this way - they are linking the Full Name only as they used to.

This is getting frustrating as items are appearing on my calendar like a birthday as "John Doe - City of Tampa Parks and Recreations's Birthday" - assuming this event was added to one of my original contacts. As I mentioned new contacts added since the account itself was re-added appear "normal" anywhere the link would appear.

What has happened to all of my original contacts.

To show you what I mean I linked 2 contacts, an original one and one that I just added and attached a screen shot.

The original contact is "Jason and Anneli Katzel"

The new one is "Adriel D. Torres"

If you look where the links are, the new one Adriel D. Torres appears properly in the links section of Jason's contact. However the original contact appears labeled as "Jason and Anneli Katzel - Charles Rutenberg Realty, Katco Construction"

If I were to add Jason and Anneli's anniversary, on the calendar the occurrence or series title would read "Jason and Anneli Katzel - Charles Rutenberg Realty, Katco Construction's Anniversary"

That is getting rather annoying real fast and I do not want to have to manually edit changes like this on potentially 2000 contacts every time I link contacts or add events.

What has happened to my original contacts when I added my account? Can this be fixed easily? Why are new contacts not affected by this same strange behavior?

Does this make sense? LOL

I know I am confused.

Thanks for reading and so much in advance for engaging me in conversation about this. If it haa been posted elsewhere on this or any other forum, I can't find it. So thank you so much.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Did you delete the contents of the contacts folder and import them again? What was the source of the contacts?

 

[sbarber5]

Did you delete the contents of the contacts folder and import them again? What was the source of the contacts?

Hi Diane, thanks for the reply.

The contacts were pulled back in directly once the exchange account was added again on the new profile. When I deleted the profile, there was no longer any outlook data files and all mail, contacts, calendars, etc were gone.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

so the only place they ever were was on the exchange server? did you ever use full name/company name as the file as?

Do you sync with a smartphone?

 

[sbarber5]

so the only place they ever were was on the exchange server? did you ever use full name/company name as the file as?

Do you sync with a smartphone?

A handful of them probably originated from a pst file that was merged into my exchange account. Another larger amount probably were created while on a different exchange server. Some on the current exchange server.

They have always worked properly.

All contacts have always been organized by first name, last name. File as Full Name.

The links have ALWAYS behaved as expected until now.

I sync with iPhones and iPads.

 

[larry]

Are you using iCloud 2 to sync? D -- do you think iCloud would do this? I know it does some strange things.

 

[sbarber5]

Are you using iCloud 2 to sync? D -- do you think iCloud would do this? I know it does some strange things.

No Larry, I am only syncing using the Exchange account. iCloud contacts, mail, calendar,reminders all turned Off.

This is really frustrating. I am hoping for a solution before too many new links from my original set of contacts become incomprehensibly long.

 

[larry]

So only a few are affected right now? Thinking out loud... I wonder if the sync process corrupted the contacts and the two fields "bled" together.

 

[sbarber5]

So only a few are affected right now? Thinking out loud... I wonder if the sync process corrupted the contacts and the two fields "bled" together.

On Jan 9, 2013, I deleted the existing profile and set up a new profile with this exchange account as well as my wife's work exchange account (first time this had ever been added to my local client).

I have been noticing this behavior ever since then and NEVER, not even once, prior.

Your explanation sounds like a possibility. I have managed to not let this get out of hand and know which links have thus far been affected.

Would it be a corruption of the entire profile or just my exchange mail account. What are the steps to test (remove and re-add exchange account?)?

Could this be an actual policy of my wife's work exchange server that has changed the settings for all accounts across this local client computer?

Thanks Larry. I feel like maybe we are heading down a path to understanding!

 

[larry]

Policies are applied to the computer, so yes they will apply to your account, but unless she is logging into the computer using her work account, policies won't be applied to the computer. If she VPNs into work, policies might be applied (but I don't think so).

You can check here for policies: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies

 

[sbarber5]

Policies are applied to the computer, so yes they will apply to your account, but unless she is logging into the computer using her work account, policies won't be applied to the computer. If she VPNs into work, policies might be applied (but I don't think so).

You can check here for policies: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies

She has never logged into the computer with her work account. This is my office computer. I recently added her exchange account primarily so I could see both of our calendars side by side for scheduling purposes. Also to help her clean up her contacts with my more complete contacts records for shared contacts (which I am yet to touch). She is not even using the exchange account from this computer at this point.

The few times she has connected to her work servers from this machine (I think over her works citrix client if that is a VPN), I never noticed this behavior at that point. Only since a couple of weeks ago as mentioned and outlined above.

 

[sbarber5]

Follow Up please? Larry was mentioning about the potential for corruption when the account was added, somehow merging Full Name and Company Name fields? Please see my response questions back towards the bottom of page 1 and please follow up with me. Thanks!

 

[Diane Poremsky]

His theory makes some sense and I suspect that is what is happening, but I have no idea why it's happening. I don't think your wife's account has any bearing on this.

 

[sbarber5]

His theory makes some sense and I suspect that is what is happening, but I have no idea why it's happening. I don't think your wife's account has any bearing on this.

If this is in fact the culprit, how can I correct the problem or at least try to. Delete and re-add my exchange account? Would I need to blow out the entire profile and start completely from scratch again, re-adding bot accounts?

 

[Diane Poremsky]

You can try a new profile - keep the current one so you can fall back to it if a new one fails.

I don't know if this might be a factor, but I've noticed similar goofy behavior in an asp application I use - if I end the last sentence in the description field with spaces, the url field merges with the description field. So.. check the affected contacts and see if the company or names fields end with spaces.

 

[sbarber5]

You can try a new profile - keep the current one so you can fall back to it if a new one fails.

I don't know if this might be a factor, but I've noticed similar goofy behavior in an asp application I use - if I end the last sentence in the description field with spaces, the url field merges with the description field. So.. check the affected contacts and see if the company or names fields end with spaces.

There are definitely no spaces at the end of the full name or company fields, just checked a handful.

All contacts that previously existed prior to the re-adding of the account a couple of weeks ago are equally affected without exception. Any new contacts I added since or if I were to add a test contact today - they are not affected by this at all.

 

[sbarber5]

Should just deleting and re-adding the one exchange account (mine) do the trick if it had become corrupted somehow in the way you are theorizing when I added it a couple of weeks ago?

 

[Diane Poremsky]

I have no idea - it's not a problem I've run into before. I'm not even sure the second account has any effect - other than the fact that you noticed the problems around the same time seems to point to it.

 

[sbarber5]

It is very peculiar... and very frustrating.

I hate the trial and error experimentation when it involves removing and re-adding accounts over and over to try and isolate something like this.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

I don't like it either... and i don't like removing accounts (or deleting profiles) unless I know its going to fix the problem.

Can you repro the problem at will? If not, it might be hard to know what works.

You could try this - copy the profile and remove her account from the copy... if you use the copy profile and it works fine, then we can blame her account. But unless you can repro it easily, it will be hard to tell if it works.