Duplicate Items

This topic covers various cases where duplicate items appear in Outlook or Digital-Clay.

Broken Links

The link between an Outlook item and a Digital-Clay item may have been broken, causing Digital-Clay to automatically create a new item when either one is changed. For example, if the user no longer has permissions to read the previous Contact, changing the Outlook Contact may create a new Digital-Clay Contact.

See Digital-Clay Changes Don't Affect Outlook Items for details on how links may break and how to fix these issues.

Shared Appointments & Recurring Appointments

Are they really duplicates? For example, double-check the Tasks' start date or the assigned user. They may be assigned to different users, especially in the case of a shared meeting where every user invited to the meeting would have a separate Digital-Clay Task. This is by design.

Multiple Users

Ensure that users aren't creating the same item (e.g. a Contact) on two different machines. For example, if two users add John Smith to their Outlooks and synchronize, Digital-Clay will have duplicate Contacts. Import from Digital-Clay into all Outlooks to avoid this or, if appropriate, try the “Synchronize all Contacts” setting to make sure every user receives all the Contacts already in the system.

Recurring Appointment issues

• If the Outlook recurring pattern was changed, Outlook deletes all the Appointment exceptions, causing Digital-Clay Tasks to become orphans with an Abandoned status. When the Appointment is saved, Digital-Clay then recreates some of the Tasks/exceptions according to the new pattern, causing 'duplicates'. There is no workaround for this, and the previous entries can be deleted manually.

• If multiple users are using the same Outlook folder with Recurring Appointments, in some cases, changing the recurring Appointment may cause duplicates. To avoid this, ensure that each user has his own Outlook Appointment folder.

Shared Meetings

In ClayStation Options, if the setting “Handle meetings awaiting a response” is checked, a duplicate may occur if the meeting is updated or deleted before a response is sent. To avoid this, uncheck the setting so that only accepted meetings will be added to Digital-Clay.