Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Alexander Joseph Pope

Alice Pritikin Steinglass

Rajendra H Vishnumurty

Eric McQuaid Zenz

Roberto Reif

Aswan Prasad

A method is presented for resolving conflicts between interrelated data on a client computer and a server computer. Information for one or more tasks stored on a client computer is published to a server computer. When one or more of the tasks are edited, at least one bit is set in a data structure for each task in which a task attribute is changed. When a sync operation is performed, tasks on the client computer are compared with a task list from the server computer. If any of the bits in the data structure for the task are set, and the date and time that the task was last modified on the server computer is later than the date and time that the client computer last initiated a sync operation, the user is alerted to a conflict in the task and is permitted to manually resolve the conflict.

Minimizing conflicts when synchronizing interrelated data between two systems

Self-referencing fields are synchronized during a synchronization pass of a two-way synchronization between a client computer and a server computer. When a synchronization operation is performed, a list of server tasks associated with the server and a list of project tasks associated with the client are loaded. For each task being synchronized two predecessor lists are maintained. During the synchronization, a comparison is conducted to determine whether to use the project task data or the server task data. When the project task data is used, then the predecessor IDs stored in the project predecessor list are used. When the server task data is used, then the predecessor IDs stored in the server predecessor list are used.

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Alexander Joseph Pope