iCloud changes your Outlook calendar and contacts.

Sorry in case I repeat someone else's posts, but I did not read the whole thread. I just knew that I had this issue that I was dealing with and there was no certain resolution at the time when I joined this forum.

I carefully planned my steps to put things back to the original state; I did not want to lose any of my records, but on the other hand - I did not want to deal with the cleanup of duplicates, like some people have suggested.

So here is what I finally decided to do and it worked! I did not lose anything and I did not have a single duplicated record.

First - you go to Control Panel on your computer and open iCloud. Disable all the synchronization. Then you do same thing on your iPhone. Then you log out off iCloud account on your computer. That will ask you if you want to keep stuff on your computer or not. You choose "yes". It will put all your records back into Outlook and remove iCloud folder. Your Outlook is safe and saved now. Now sign out off iCloud on your iPhone. It will ask you the same question - if you want to keep the records on your phone. Choose "no". All the records are now deleted off your iPhone. Open your iTunes; connect your iPhone. Once your iPhone is connected and selected, change the tab from "Summary" to "Info". Now there you can choose whatever database you want to sync your Outlook with. Once you do that - you will get your chosen records synced to your phone. Voila!

BTW: I did submit my complaint with Apple and I was waiting for their fix of this problem. Later, I had them on the phone and they did say that they were working on the fix. I decided to wait and not do anything about trying to fix my problem and potentially risking of screwing up my database. Just now I called them again to find out about the status and they told me that they are NOT working on this and the way iCloud works is the way it was designed and they don't see any problem with it. That was the end of my waiting and there, I got it all fixed.

APPLE: thank you very much for your broken design!

thank you!! panic ALMOST set in...

Warren Mcbride wrote:

Turns out that what happens is when icloud syncs, it sends a blank address book up to the cloud which then feeds a blank address book back to everything else.

So you are right. At this point I am turning off ALL of icloud, on my PC, my mac pro, my iphone and my ipod and I am also just going to to direct updates from the PC.

Apple really pooched the pooch on icloud.

iCloud does not sync! it's a subscription service and when Outlook subscribes it does so by making new folders for the subscribed services, this is not changeable.

And that is my primary beef with iCloud. I do not trust iCloud to not loose my info. This is based on experience with both .me and iCloud. It there was a preference to set either iCloud OR my PC as the master list, personally that would satisfy me.

Warren Mcbride wrote:

And that is my primary beef with iCloud. I do not trust iCloud to not loose my info. This is based on experience with both .me and iCloud. It there was a preference to set either iCloud OR my PC as the master list, personally that would satisfy me.

You seem to be misunderstanding so I will keep it real simple

iCloud (on the web) is the 'master calendar, it is in fact the only calendar, everything else is subscribed to it.

And YOU seem to misunderstand the point I am making. I don't WANT iCloud to be the master/only calendar. Mobilme had the option if anything was going to change on my computer, I could veto that. That has gone away with iCloud.

Hope that was simple enough for YOU!

Warren Mcbride wrote:

And YOU seem to misunderstand the point I am making. I don't WANT iCloud to be the master/only calendar. Mobilme had the option if anything was going to change on my computer, I could veto that. That has gone away with iCloud.

Hope that was simple enough for YOU!

Then you can not use iCloud.

Bye

And that is what I have been saying to threads like this.

Adios.

The OLMixedFolders do work.

Thx for the link.

Although Apple should make it work anyhow without this third party tool.

Thank you, thank you, thank you chrisneu! These instructions are exactly what I have been looking for. I have asked the apple support folks (who are not geniuses by the way) multiple times how to dump iCloud and they don't know. If you are committed to Outlook (like myself and maybe another hundred million other people) it is required that synching work with the default calendar, contacts, etc. files which is what happened with the cable synching before iCloud so apple continues to ignore the issue with iCloud.

If you want true integration with the iphone and outlook on your PC, GO BACK TO THE OLD CABLE SYNCHING with chrisneu's instructions. Apple doesn't get it. These guys don't write code and build user friendly intuitive applications any better than anyone else.

thanks for the instructions - planning on doing this soon!

obviously i am having the same issue as everyone else here and keep ending up with missing information, duplicates, etc. so i am planning to disconnect the icloud sync and stick to the usb itunes sync. however, right now on my iPhone i have the contact information exactly as i want it - i was using that as my 'master' list - is there a way to preserve this data?

I do computer consulting in my little town. One of my business clients was all fired up to move to the iCloud, with the promise that iCloud would make her calendars, contacts, ringtones, photos available anywhere/everywhere/any device.

We were shocked when I set up her iCloud, and we installed the iCloud for Windows Control panel. This is a busy person who manages 4 calendars, a personal calendar, client calendar, and two others for various reasons. Imagine our horror when we found only one calendar survived after the sunc!

The user has all four calendars on their iPhone, and they've been scared to sync the iPhone to anything for fear of losing the calendars. So I'm working on a solution for restoring all four calendars to Outlook for syncing with iCloud.

By the way, another hard lesson we learned. If you back up Outlook as a PST file, remember to make separate PST backups of each calendar with unique names, then direct Outlook to restore to the calendar folder. If you don't do this, it's a known issue that Outlook only restores one calendar to Outlook.

So here is my possible solution. I found another thread here that describes the settings for setting up iCloud as an Outlook account in your Outlook. What I'm hoping is this: That once the iCloud account is built, I can build the unique calendars to the iCloud. Outlook configuration, and these calendars will transfer to iCloud. Then, if it's exactly the same name as the calendars on the iPhone, hopefully it will populate these calendars.

Does anyone think this will work, and if not, what am I missing? Thanks

I want to say thank you for everyones input, this issue has been a stumbling block for me ever since I first tried to sync Outlook with Mobileme a year ago, with all of the issues happening to me that everyone here describes, including the removal of my reminders and recurrences. I have recently been contemplating a new solution to the problem, and wonder what everyone thinks of it. I currently sync an android phone with outlook 2010 with one tolerable issue, on the first of every month I get about a dozen of my recurring appointments that change from once a month recurrences, to every day occurrences. It takes me 10 minutes to fix them and then I dont have to deal with the issue for another month. I am contemplating the switch to a 4S, however, would prefer to wait until the v5 model, as it will (hopefully) compare in size and weight to my HTC EVO. Here is the possible solution to the outlook to icloud issues. What if I use itunes to sync the iphone to Outlook, and then let the phone sync to the cloud? I currently sync the cloud to my imac and my ipad with no issues. If the phone updates everything from outlook into the cloud, then from this day forward I will just access the cloud data on my pc, and stop using outlook. What do you think?

Snowracer -- I sync my Android phone and my iPad with Outlook 2007 using two tools that sync with Gmail. I then sync my iPad and phone with Gmail. I use the free Google calendar sync for my calendar, and gSyncit from http://www.fieldstonsoftware.com/ for contacts. gSyncit isn't free, but it's reasonable and works better than any of the several other solutions I tried for syncing contacts. I could probably just use gSyncit now, but I found Google Calendar Sync first and have just kept using it.

PCApplefan -- I only sync one calendar, so I don't know whether either of these tools can handle 4 of them. I think gSyncit probably can -- I think that's how it syncs tasks. But you'd need to check with them.

Thank you for your detailed information. I stupidly turned iCloud on for contacts and calendars over the weekend. Thinking, after talking to an Apple techo after OS 5 was installed, that the glitches might be fixed!

BIG MISTAKE!

By turning iCloud off, my contacts reappeared, along with the addresses of strangers - yet again.

And I have four versions of my calendar!!!

But my distribution lists will not work. Even though they have retained the contact data, the"properties" advise that the lists have been deleted.

One colleague has suggested that I uninstall OS 5 and start again. Before I take this step, has anyone done it and solved the issues?

Thanks,

Ron