iCloud changes your Outlook calendar and contacts.

Totally agree, I had a huge panick situation yesterday, I tried to uninastall iCloud because it was messing up my Outlook contacts, and suddenly all my contacts were gone. Tried serveral things, then all the contacts on my iPhone were gone too... After 2 hours of messing around, re-installing iCloud, dragging all my contacts back in my normal Outlook contacts folder, then de-installing iCloud again, I finally have everything back to normal (had to delete some double contacts but I was so relieved I didn't care). Maybe it had to do something with Google Calendar Sync running in the background? But that's not syncing contacts, so don't know why that should interfere?

I don't think this is a pretty solution for Outlook users, feels like a way to force us to abandon our own way of working with the programs we like. No thank you, Apple. After the horrible update to iOS 4, I already had my whole calendar messed up thanks to their daylight savings time bug (which they NEVER admitted to).

I'm switching to Android just as soon as my current cell phone contract allow me to.

I cannot find any calendar or contact info once I "synced" and it's all in the cloud. How do I transfer it back into my original outlook databases. Is there an online export function?

Thanks Richardfromblackburn north (whew, thats a mouthful). I have done this and will see what happens with icloud.

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.

What a nightmare. After switching on iCloud I immediately was notified of sync issues between outlook and ical (which didn't happen before). I choose to keep the outlook entries. And then what happened? All calendar entries in outlook disappeared and I have them 4 times in iCal now. How to undo this mess?

As an early mobile me subscriber, I should hae known better. I have duplicate and missing calendar entries on all of my devices. I have no idea how I am going to get this mess fixed. Apple iCloud wasn't ready to be released. At least MobileMe was working. Now I have nothing.

I was also disappointed with the iCloud synching with Outlook. When there are no options to set, or instructions to follow you'd hope it would just work, but not using the default Outlook folders is not a workable solution. I was previously happily synching my Outlook Calendar to my iPhone using Google Calendar Sync, and my Outlook contact with Soocial - with Google Calendar and Contacts pushed to my phone through the Exchange client functionality. Only drawback is that these updates weren't realtime, but only synched a few times a day.

But, it worked, and it was free... going back to that solution.

I completely agree with all of you.

What a nightmare opening outlook and finding that all my appointments, contacts, activities were gone! Then I discvered the "in iCloud" to the left and my heart started to beat a little bit slowly.

But I have a question: using iCloud doesn't allow me setting any alarm (dunno if the english interface call it this way) in appointments or activities, because Outlook says that they are in external folders (it is true). then? No more alarms?

No reminders in Outlook because you can't set the iCloud as your default data file. So, no reminders and no Outlook today. Really a total failure. I think Microsoft should make it possible to set an imap account as your default as well, but this is still poor design by Apple. I'm going with the google calendar sync solution. It would have been really nice for iCloud to work though.

Thanks Kevin.

As I wrote elsewhere, in the end I decided to keep iCloud running. Outlook allows setting reminders, even if it advises that you can't :-). If it can't show them... never mind. My iPhone and/or iPad are always on my desktop. So they take care of it.

So has there been any "official" response to any of this that I am just unable to find or is Apple pretending that all is right with the world in spite of this? I love my new 4s, but the iCloud iSucks.