Work Arounds

Work-Arounds for certain issues

As issues arrise for particular environments I will try and document the work-arounds here. Please feel free to update this page with your own work-arounds if you discover something odd.

Microsoft BPOS Folder subscriptions

Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Standard Suite) contains a custom build (they call it a wave) of Exchange. The wave in production today does not support subscriptions to folders. I have implemented a way around this restriction via the GenericFolder#sync_items_since! method. The workflow to use might be something like this:

inbox = Folder.get_folder :inbox

# this clears synchronization so the next time you call sync it will only return new events.
items = inbox.sync_items_since! (Date.today - 7).to_datetime

# wait for some amount of time ........

new_items = inbox.sync_items!

While this works well as an alternative to subscriptions in BPOS, I would still recommend a GenericFolder#items_since coupled with Subscriptions for Exchange servers that support it. The subscriptions approach has a lot less overhead than the sync_items_since! approach.