iCloud and Office Mac 2011 sync

Define "absolute rubbish"...

What does Outlook do regarding tasks that iCal doesn't?

I was In a similar situation, switched to 27" iMac I ordered online from Apple with preinstalled Office for Mac 2011 and have had zero problems. I did however drop Outlook and switched to iCal, Mail and Address Book.

Yes, that's what I should have done, and now am doing now that it is only now apparent that running Outlook on a Mac is an exercise in frustration. I had hoped that the consultants in Business Sales at The Apple Store were there to make the transition to Mac a smooth one for both me and my wife. Instead we were sold something incompatible, had to pay for what should have been two free upgrades to Lion (though with another hour of my time I am told I will be reimbursed), and I ended up having to do the actual data migration myself. Live and learn.

Outlook is often seen as just an e-mail client........its a lot more than that. Ask anyone at General Electric,Philips or KPN. Outlook is the client for exchange server. used as a cms, data storage Exchange Server provides a collaboration environment that delivers secure messaging capabilities to recipients inside and outside an organization. Besides a powerful email server, it supports group scheduling capabilities, discussion groups, team folders, mobile and web access, global adress lists and a host of other features.

There is no mac equivalent to this system so if your using it just as an e-mail client then go with the mac integrated progs, if on the otherhand you work from home and require all of the exchange features stop moaning that iCloud doesnt do it because you should be using the exchange capabilities of your iPhone/iPad. This isnt revolutionary stuff, clouds arent an Apple invention we have been using apple mobile devices in our network for nearly two years. Exchange pushes and syncs it has a web interface so you can log in from everywhere so get a life.

Folks, I suppose the bottom line here is all we can do is wait for Microsoft to release a service pack for Outlook for Mac that includes CalDAV capability (so we can sync Outlook calendar with iPhone)? The temporary solution I have in place right now is iCloud is syncing calendar and contacts with the native iCal and Address Book.

Drawing my conclusions from 30 years dealing with personal computers, as encapsulated in the Steve Jobs biography, having Apple and Microsoft cooperate is usually an iffy proposition. Companies compete for monopolies. Customers have to suffer the turf wars. Twas ever thus.

Jan Hertog wrote:

Outlook is often seen as just an e-mail client........its a lot more than that. Ask anyone at General Electric,Philips or KPN. Outlook is the client for exchange server. used as a cms, data storage Exchange Server provides a collaboration environment that delivers secure messaging capabilities to recipients inside and outside an organization. Besides a powerful email server, it supports group scheduling capabilities, discussion groups, team folders, mobile and web access, global adress lists and a host of other features.

There is no mac equivalent to this system so if your using it just as an e-mail client then go with the mac integrated progs, if on the otherhand you work from home and require all of the exchange features stop moaning that iCloud doesnt do it because you should be using the exchange capabilities of your iPhone/iPad. This isnt revolutionary stuff, clouds arent an Apple invention we have been using apple mobile devices in our network for nearly two years. Exchange pushes and syncs it has a web interface so you can log in from everywhere so get a life.

I agree with you that Outlook, as part of a properly integrated Exchange Server system is excellent, but it is much less good at dealing with other sync/cloud solutions.

Exchange is the granddaddy of all the commercial sync solutions, and it is excellent, but not the cheapest.

Hi All,

I am new to this forum, but hopefully my 2 cents will be usefull for others.

First of all I don't like when people say 'you are stupid if you are using Outlook' etc. As some of people here pointed out there are some reasons for using Outlook and some people will like it more then the built in apps from Apple. I personally use Outlook for Mac 2011 because I like the way I can organize things, and lots of shourtcuts it provides (e.g. I can move messages to folders without touching the mouse - I prefer to use keyboard as I can touch type).

On the other hand what is annoying is that if in Spotlight I search for something that happens to be in the email then Outlook will not provide the preview for it, I cannot see the content of the message in the Spotlight. And this is the reason why I use both email apps, Outlook and the Apple Mail. Of course I use IMAP, not POP3, as I prefer to keep emails on the mail server. I saw a few posts from people about importing the .pst Outlook file from Windows to Outlook for Mac 2011. I tried that too and it fails - some mails were lots, some of them lost the attachements. The way I solved the problem was to upload my emails from the .pst file back to the server using IMAP protocol. That I did still on the Outlook for Windows. Now all my emails are in the cloud on the IMAP mail server. Of course I had to have enough storage on that server.

Going back to the initial problem of synching the calendar with the iCloud, I experienced the same, after turning on the iCloud all my events were gone from iCal and from Outlook. I figured out that when you turn on the iCloud this is not synchronization, rather iCloud takes all the events from 'on my mac' calendar and changes them to 'iCloud'. So in practice iCloud just snatches all events and moves them out of the local mac. As a result Outlook calendar will be cleaned as well. Now, in iCal you can turn on iCloud as one source of calendar events and these will appear in iCal. If you right-click on an event later on you can swich it to local mac - at which point the event should be brought back to your local mac and it should also appear in Outlook.

Summarizing, with iCloud you don't synchronize the events. If you turn on the iCloud it will take all the calendar events to the cloud, leaving nothing locally. Then in iCal you can use iCloud as a calendar source, similarily as you can use Google calendar as another source.

I think at the moment there is no way to make Outlook 2011 work with iCloud. What we should be expecting is to have Outlook be able to pull the calendars not only from the local mac but also from other sources like iCloud or Google.

Microsofts support site (in the FAQ) says Outlook for Mac does not currently support WebDav services, I interpret that to mean MS will add support in time to come, hopefully soon, iCloud is a WebDav service.

Here's one workaround to sync outlook on the Mac to your iPhone, iPad, etc...

Turn on sync services in Outlook. This will sync outlook (contacts, cal, etc..) to the native Mac apps.

Then use iTunes to sync to your devices. It's a manually process but if you sync iTunes wirelessly it's not that big of a deal. and it doesn't duplicate etc...

That's the best way I could come up with. Of course if you have an exchange server that is the way to go

Thank you Mmmccc... While reading this entire thread, I was curious if that would work.

Question: Do you have to turn off all ICloud account/syncs on both the IPhone and the Mac? I tried that previously and I got duplicate info on I Phone calander and contacts because it is still pulling from ICloud.

Has anyone else had success with this workaround? Thanks

YES, turn off the iCloud for Contacts and Calendar for all devices.

Hi

I am reasonably new to a Macbook Pro having used a PC previously and backed up Outlook Calendar and addresses between iPhone and the PC.

When switching to the Mac I installed Office for Mac expecting it to work the same and was amazed when I could not sync in the same way and thought I was doing something wrong. After investigating found out not possible.

I needed to install Parallels with Windows 7 in order to use Office 2010 for Windows as I share a lot of files with other MS Office users and Office for Mac not fully compatible with complex spreadshets. I have now deleted the Office for Mac as no use to me and looked for an alternative for syncing Outlook and iPhone. I then had a thought as I was effectively running a PC within my Mac surely I could sync with iPhone via Icloud using that.

I downloaded the Icloud Windows desktop ( http://www.apple.com/icloud/setup/pc.html ) and enabled sync with Outlook and tried it and it worked a treat. Perhaps not a viable solution due to cost unless you have a need to install Parallels/Windows/Office but it is a good solution for me that works. I am now synced between Outlook 2010 on PC partition, iCal/Address Book on the Mac and my iPhone and everything working fine in any direction.