Syncing Lotus Notes, iCal, and MobileMe

The saga continues .... I think I've made this my own personal mission at this point.

Thanks Ryan for asking for an update. I've been fairly busy and haven't returned here recently.

This is my current scenario, a large amount of bailing wire and duct tape.

At work I have a Windows XP PC with Lotus Notes. This is always on.
(I basically use my Powerbook running 10.5.4 to actually work. This is running the Lotus Notes 8.5 for OS/X.)

I use VistoMobile to get my work email to the iPhone. Service with VistoMobile seems to be pretty consistent at this point.
(Oh no! Did I just say that out-loud?) Since VistoMobile is not a push solution, I have SMS messages sent to the iPhone if I receive a priority message (or one from my VP). This is done as a forwarding option within Lotus Notes.

I use Companion Link for Google to sync my Lotus Notes Calendar entries to a Google Calendar, one way sync only.
On my MAC, I use Busy Sync to sync my Google Calendar to ICal. I then use MobileMe to sync between my MACs and the iPhone.

Most of the time this works fairly well. These are the issues that I've run into.

With email, the biggest issue is having to reset the iPhone occasionally. This only seems to be necessary if I forget to turn off WiFi before I get to work. In these circumstance, the wifi networks at work do not allow access to email ports through the firewall.

I was unable to get Companion Link to auto synchronize on its own. So I turned it off. To that end I set up two scheduled tasks in Windows. The first does Companion Link Synchronization every 30 minutes. The second runs a program, aKill, that kills the synchronizations "Ok Dialogue" 10 minutes after the sync is scheduled.

With the calendar entries, on occasion ( once every couple weeks) entries get duplicated on Google Calendar. I haven't determined the circumstances that cause this yet. When this occurs, I log into Google Calendar and delete all the entries. Then in Companion Link I will do a "purge and reload" of the calendar entries on Google.

This was working fairly consistently. There were some old Lotus Notes repeating calendar entries that were messing up once in a while. However, we had gone through a Notes identity migration a few months back and I feel these are remnants of that process.

Overall, my time to manage this setup has reduced considerably to the point I didn't have to think about it too often. It just worked, surprisingly.

Until this week ... I had to do the purge and reload. Everything still syncs correctly to iCal and out to the iPhone and other MACs. However, when I view the calendar on MobileMe some of the custom repeat entries (Every 2 weeks) are showing up on the wrong week. I've spent a few hours chatting with Apple Support on this. It seems as though something is a wrong with the MobileMe account, which was converted from a .Mac account.

If I get a resolution to this, I'll post an update. As I said, bailing wire and duct tape!!

Cheers.

Update 9/5/2008 PM

BTW, I had also tried Lotus Notes GoBetween from PocketMAC which was touted as syncing directly from Lotus Notes to iCal. back in Feb. 2008. Unfortunately, I could never get that to work. From some of the other postings on the web it seems like there may be an update coming out later this year.