Synching Outlook w/iCloud sent invites to everyone

This happened to me - total disaster and really embarrassing at work! I am very new to Apple (just over a couple of months) and up until now have been really impressed. What worries me is the silence here... are Apple normally this arrogant and ignore their customers?

I find all the sycophantic whooping and cheering at Apple events a bit creepy (maybe that is because I am British and I don’t get that aspect of American culture?) and I am now concerned that Apple is all show and no go!? The people I have dealt with in the Apple shops have been great but they don’t seem to be told much either about what is going on?

I am told by Apple Fans (is it me or do they remind you of those nerds you imagine go to Star Trek conventions?) that Apple is famous for customer service but I see none here. As someone else has said – even a ‘we are working on the problem’ would suffice.

Come on Apple stop cheering and clapping outside your latest store like a bunch of brain washed cult victims and offer some support! (isn’t that what a Support Community is supposed to do?????)

Same problems for me. As well Outlook can not push calender appointments and tasks by default to icloud. You have to manually move them to icloud but then outlook cant use them in the todo list.

Why hasnt someone from apple at least replied? Seems typical of Apple to ignore the problems and pretend they don't exist. Especially when they are to do with programs that they dont own. I feel duped in purchasing another apple product at the moment.

I still cannot belive that there is no ansewr anywere on the web reguarding this problem. I setup 2 people at work with all the meetings requested again, even if they were not the meeting organizer. I have a bunch of people waiting for me to setup they icloud but will not go near them untill there is a fix. Using win 7 with Outlook 2010.

I synched my home PC outlook 2007 and my work PC outlook 2010 and Iphone to ICloud. Several hours later the cloud started sending new meeting requests to all recipients (in one case 148 people) for meetings other people scheduled that I had already accepted in my calendar prior to synching, in some cases in triplicate. These notices listed ME as the organizer (I was not). If I deleted any of these meetings on my phone or PC's it then sent cancellation notices to all recipients from me as the event organizer although I was not. My only indication this happened was the angry responses from the clients and colleagues whose meetings I cancelled or people that I spammed with notifications of meetings previously scheduled by another person. If I deleted any of these meetings from any calendar ICloud sent mulitple notices to everyone cancelling the event naming me as the organizer. I have turned off ICloud for calendars on every device and I am only using the cloud to synch contacts...have not been able to find anything from Apple addressing this problem.

As Apple was ignoring this thread, I contacted technical support (I am still within my 90 days of purchase) and the issue was a real surprise with the people I was talking to (does anybody look at these forums?) I also pointed them to this forum, which they found. I was told that this issue has been referred to 'engineers' as a top priority (this was Wednesday) and I have not heard anything as yet. I felt sure that Apple would have acknowledged that they knew about the problem, and were working on it, on this thread but we still just have silence. This morning I got an email asking for feedback on my support call (more show and no substance!), despite not being resolved. As soon as I hear anything, I will report back. I wonder how many thousands of others have been hit by this spamming bug?

I should add that ICloud also catches new, not just existing appointments as they are emailed to you and before you can even open the email appointment request it has sent a meeting invitation to all recipients with you as the organizer. In all instances the appointments were sent to my work email address by the true meetig organizer and were hijacked by ICloud and resent using my home email address, which is also my apple ID email address or my new ICloud address. trying to reach Apple tech support.

I have just spoken to Apple about this issue and they say 'it is expected behaviour' - astonishing! Apparently you need to either use the iCloud or exchange. If you use both then iCloud treats all your calendar entries as new entries and resends the meeting to everyone on the invitation list (as we all know all too well!!!!!!) I asked over and over and over that Apple warn people registering for iCloud that this could happen but they have arrogantly refused. I asked that they respond to this forum - they arrogantly refused. The manager I spoke to just talked about following procedures and that Apple would not release anything until they have a solution (bloody useless!). So, in the meantime, more and more users will spam work colleagues, clients, customers and business contacts without even knowing it and Apple simply don't care. I am not sure how to do it but it strikes me that we need to spread the word ourselves? If you are on Exchange then do not go anywhere near iCloud!!!!

Thanks for the update. Unfortunately I am not using Exchange at all, so this doesn't explain or solve the problem. Anyone else having these issues without Exchange?

Folks

In case you are wondering that you may just start using the iCloud and this will be a one time deal I would recommend not to venture into doing that

Once you sync your calendar and take the heat from all you friends/family/co-workers/ customers .... It does not stop there..... Any activity that happens on your iCloud resends the recurruing invites that do not have an end date...

I have some which are standing meetings with my team mates and I created a test appointment on the iCal to seei f t flows into outlook and then when I deleted it ..... It sent out all the recurring invites without an end date on it to all the ppl listed on them ...

I am very sure that this is not expected behavior and it is a half baked product that is rolled out to the masses.

I just spent the past two hours on the phone with apple tech support. After an initial 10 minutes of telling me this was designed to be used only with a MAC etc, although that is not how it was advertised a Senior Advisor finally told me this will continue to happen if you synch with outlook and especially more than one PC. MACs are designed with you as the top tier user, no one can push an appointment to your calendar and thus ICloud and ICal assume any appointment request scheduled on your PC calendar is something you are generating as the organizer, it creates a new meeting request and begins notifying. Every time you synch it picks up your outlook meeting request appointments as new events to schedule and notify--and if you are synching more than one PC you are going to have a lot of duplicates because everytime the cloud picks up the event on one calendar it will push it to your phone and to PC calendar #2 (if you are synching more than one PC) and then when it synchs again it will pick it up from number 2 and continue to regenerate appointments on-going all the while sending out notifications. So you can only synch one PC...but even doing so it will still pick up new meeting requests you received since the last synch and push them out as your own. The service advisor agreed that if there was an option on the PC control panel to "turn off automatic forwarding of meeting notifications to recipients" or in the calendar settings on icloud.com you could stop the cloud from doing this or at least when the cloud picked up the new meeting requests and thought you generated it, it would have to ask permission somewhere, pc, iphone before it could send notices. He also said this request must be made where an engineer will read it www.apple.com/feedback click on the ICLOUD icon on the bottom of the page and ask that there be a way to turn off automatic notification of meeting requests to all recipients. He suggested that the more requests they get the more likely they will be to address this and in a timely manner, everyone on Outloo who is synching with cloud will have this problem and everyone checking this site should take a minute to make this request and maybe we can get this in front of the right people to get something done.

Thanks for the update. I find it astonishing that a company that supposedly prides itself on customer service has to rely on upset users to 'lobby' engineers via some 'feedback' facility to get a major bug fixed! Shocking in the extreme! Both of us have contacted Apple Support and on both occasions they have failed to support. Why do we have to 'feedback' to get something done - what is the point of Apple support if they have no power, desire or ability to get the message through to THEIR engineers. I find the arrogance and incompetence of all this difficult to comprehend. And still people are spamming on a colossal scale without knowing and Apple simply don't care. I have contacted the BBC in the UK (click programme) to see if they will dig into this and if we can get this issue into the wider press - at least it will warn others when Apple won't. As I have said, I am new to Apple and I am shocked at their dire standards!

I have informed the apple byte at cnet ... Hope to have it out there as muchas possible

Just had the same experience as you guys ... fortunately I work in a telco and my co-workers are quite understanding when it comes to glitches of experimental technology ... ;-)

Anyway, I'll let the iCloud be until I hear that something has been done about this ...

Cheers, Robert

Apple!! Thankfully I only did this to 1 event to a small group of people, but this is a serious flaw. WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO DISABLE MEETING INVITES FROM ICLOUD....

This could have been potentially disasterous. Is it just me, or does this seem like something that would have been very easy to test??? Nice QA Apple.

Sincerely,

A long time fan.