outlook calendar sync with Ical mavericks, outlook calendar sync with Ical maverik

You're not alone! I have struck the same issue since upgrading to Mavericks. The same applies to the syncing of Contacts between Outlook & (Mac) Contacts.

If like me you (weren't) using iCloud to sync your iCal & Contacts between your Mac and your iPhone I think you'd find local syncing of contact & calendar info would have stopped. The ability to select contact & calendar syncing has now gone from iTunes.

From what I can tell from 'searches' the only way you can sync your iPhone with iCal/Contacts on your Mac is now via iCloud. I've long avoided iCloud for everything except Find my Phone but now I appear to have been forced into it. I've now enabled calendars and contacts on iCloud (iPhone & Mac) and am waiting ... jury is still out.

So far email (gmail a/c's) seems OK across Outlook & Mail on my Mac & my iPhone.

This doesn' resolve the Outlook <-> Calendars/Contacts issue however.

I have bookmarked this post & will come back if I can find anything ...

FYI ... I've posted the following on Microsofts community forum:

Outlook 2011 14.3.8 Contacts and Calendar events no longer synchronising since OS X 10.9 upgrade

I recently upgraded to OS X 10.9 and since the upgrade I have discovered that Apple has kindly removed the contact and calendar syncing options from iTunes.

The previous version of OS X (Mountain Lion) synced perfectly with Outlook via iCal and Apple Contacts ... now it seems the functionality has been removed.

Before embarking on an OS X downgrade I'm searching around to see a) if others have encountered the same issue b) whether anyone has been able to ascertain whether this is likely to be fixed by MS or Apple? and if so when? or lastly whether some smart cookie out there has found a solution.

In response to my post on the MS forum:

Apple is not going to fix this. Mavericks has removed sync since it was highly unreliable. I suspect that we will not see support in Outlook 2011 since it's already 3 yrs old. If Microsoft does add support it would be in the next version which has not been announced. If it were easy to add, I suspect they would have added support with Office 2011 was released.

OK ... so we're clear that we've lost that functionality. Make sure you add your two cents worth via Outlook Help/Send Feedback!

So for a workaround to get your Outlook calendar on your iPhone .... albeit a touch manual ... and you now need to use iCloud.

1. Get your iCloud set up for Calendars under Preferences on your Mac ... tick Calendars.

2. Do the same on your iPhone if you have one.

3. Open a browser and browse to iCloud.com and log in.

Now do some testing ...

1. Create a Calendar event on the iCloud.com web based calendar e.g. Test - iCloud.com

2. Create a Calendar event in iCal e.g. Test - iCal

3. Create a Calendar event on the your iPhone calendar e.g. Test - iPhone

Hopefully you should now see all these events appear in all three calendars. N.B.: close the calendar on the iPhone and reopen to refresh. I encountered an issue with them not appearing on the iPhone at first but resolved it by going into the iPhone's Settings/Mail, Contacts, Calendars/Calendars/Default Calendar and select your preferred iCloud calendar.

You may also need to go into iCal/Preferences/Accounts and select or enable the default iCloud a/c.

Once that is all working then we can move on ... but this is where it becomes a little tiresome and adds another step that you'll have to remember to do each time you add an event (sorry!).

Hopefully you've got two screens to make this as easy as possible.

Open Outlook Calendar and drag a meeting from Outlook and drop it on the iCal icon in the Application dock.

If you have iCal open on your other screen you will see it arrive and it will pop up a box for you to categorise it i.e. Work, Friends etc.

Yes you have to do this for each one I'm afraid however recurring meetings will come across OK.

I sped the process by using Month view in Outlook, dragging all events for that month to the desktop where it will automatically convert to an .ics file. Once done, highlight them all and drag them all to the iCal dock icon in one hit.

A bit painful just to get your iPhone and Outlook calendars synced but it works. Just remember if you create a Meeting on your iPhone or in Outlook you will need to remember to repeat this process.

Hope this is useful!! Any improvements welcome :-)

Further ...

Similar theory with Contacts.

Enable in iCloud on iPhone and you Mac.

Drag a Contact direct from Outlook and drop onto Mac Contacts icon in the dock.

If you create a new one on your iPhone it will sync with Mac Contacts, drag from there to your desktop (cahnges the format to .vcf) then drag that onto the Outlook icon in the dock. A direct drag and drop doesn't seem to work.

I don't know whose fault this is (MS or Apple or both) but this is absurd. Jappas says, "Mavericks has removed sync since it was highly unreliable" but I found it worked fine. Now my calendar is next to useless since new entries don't appear on my iPhone. I'm happy to use iCloud, but since that won't sync my Outlook calendar either, what's the use. I appreciate your attempt to provide a manual work-around Jappas, but dragging every entry between calendars is a crazy way of doing things. I provided my feedback to MS, but I feel jerked around by both these companies.

Dissappointing perhaps, and definately annoying but that was one of the responses I got to my post on the Microsoft for Mac forum. Here's another:

Sync Services were depreciated in Mountain Lion (but they were still there). Apple announced loud and clear that they were migrating to CalDAV and CardDAV for all their synchronizations (like Google and many others). I wasn't entirely surprised that Sync Services got cut off with Mavericks.

Now the real problem is that Outlook doesn't support Cal/CardDAV.

If that's an important feature for you (and I suspect it is), I would strongly encourage you to use the Help > Send Feedback command from within Outlook to let MS know, and help them prioritize future development.

So personally as a relatively non-techie I cannot argue one way or another as to whether Apple provided sufficient notice but maybe in the future before one commits to pressing the "upgrade" button the big guys might be kind enough to provide us a list of 'the things that won't work going forward' rather than just the 'new features'.

I even attempted to roll back to Mountain Lion only to discover I'd hit another 'bug' within Time Machine so essentially I have to live with it the way it is until Outlook 2013 or 2014 is released, switch to iCal etc or follow the recommendation and try Exchange online.

Quietly fuming ...

No probs. Sorry I couldn't provide the silver bullet.

Wrong forum but re-your thought about moving to Mac Mail - I have been a Mac user now for about 5 years but my preference for ease of use has been formerly Entourage and latterly Outlook 2011. However with both products I have had relaibility/stability issues from time to time and it always seemed to be due to an increasingly large dbase.

N.B.: my set up is non- Exchange, all via IMAP with predominantly Gmail a/c's.

On top of that, backing up Entourage (Ithink this was addressed in Outlook 2011) meant backing up entire copies of the dbase each time rather than only new or modified items.

So I actually set up Mac Mail to run concurrently as a background task for failover/redundancy as it has a reputation of being more stable (probably due to it's Unix roots) and has single item instancing so backing up is more efficient.

Within Mac Mail I create archive folders and every 6 months or so 'move' anything older than 12 months off to archive. It's still local (as well as Time Machine backed up) and searchable.

That way I always have a full copy of all my mail 'available' for searches etc. I then 'clean up' Outlook which has appears to have helped and has the side benefit of controlling my Gmail capcity usage.

I just talked to MS, and they say even upgrading to Exchange won't fix the problem. They say there's nothing that can be done except trying to downgrade to OS X 10.7. But, they assured me their research team is working on a fix. Yeah, right.

1. Apple has removed sync services in OS X Mavericks. Therefore, you cannot sync Outlook 2011 with Contacts or Calendar.

2. Apple has removed the ability to sync through iTunes in OS X Mavericks, so that, even if you use Contacts and Calendar on the Mac, you can only sync them with your iPhone through iCloud, thus exposing all your contacts and calendar information to the mercies of the Web.

3. Microsoft does not not support CalDAV and CardDAV in Outlook, so there is no way to sync directly through iCloud, except perhaps by setting up a Microsoft Exchange account.

4. Apple makes it extremely difficult (virtually impossible) to revert to a version of OSX that is earlier than OS X Mavericks once Mavericks is installed.

In short, we are screwed and neither company seems to care.

I just took a punt and opened an online Microsoft Exchange account. It works perfectly, all calender, contacts, mail is synced on the macbook and all devices nicely. No need for icloud. Yes, it is costing me $4 per month but for the overall convenience and stability it's worth it. This will at least be a good work around until another simple solution is presented.

If only gmail calender and contacts would talk to Outlook 2011, then there would be no issue but then again if Apple didn't take away the "info tab" then we would not be wasting our time either.

Thank you for the update on using Microsoft Exchange. I have read on a number of other posts that people are having trouble syncing even with Exchange. Given your success, I will try it myself later today and see if I can get it to work.

Given that Microsoft Office has been the premier set of applications on the Mac for decades, both Microsoft and Apple must have known long about this upcoming problem with Mavericks and Office and chosen to ignore it. Both companies have grown so large that they are displaying the typical arrogance of a monopoly. Apple was always better than Microsoft, but since the death of Steve Jobs it appears to me that they are quickly adopting the corporate culture of Microsoft.

All of you should think hard about this experience before you support putting government in charge of your health care.

I have run into a gotcha using Exchange as the backend for calendaring.

My corporate email and calendaring is Exchange, but I've used the native MacOS Mail and iCal applications for years. I have encountered a problem with iCal since 10.9, however. In the past, when scheduling a meeting, I could begin typing the Exchange Display Name of a directory object for a location. iCal would do an interactive search of the directory's location resouces (i.e., would not include email addresses) as I would type. I could then select the room resource I needed for a meeting.

iCal seems to no longer perform any look ups against the directory from the meeting location field. If I manually enter the valid address for the location, in the location field, it appears as though there is no communication with the resource to check on availability or to reserve the location.

If I use the location address as an invitee, there is an interaction with Exchange that shows whether or not it's available and will schedule the room if available for a first-come/first-served room.

I have done the following:

1. Signed up for an Onmicrosoft exchange account.

2. Enabled that Onmicrosoft exchange account in Microsoft Outlook 2011.

3. Enabled sync services to sync Contact, Contacts, Tasks and Notes with the Onmicrosoft exchange account.

4. After I set up the Onmicrosoft exchange account, the following folders appeared at the left bottom of my screen : inbox, drafts, sent items, deleted items and junk email folders under an OnMicrosoft heading.

5. I tested the syncing of email by sending a test email from Office 365 online to my regular email address. It showed up in my email AND in the sent folder under the OnMicrosoft heading in Outlook 2011 on my Mac. Consequently, Microsoft Outlook 2011 and Outlook 365 do appear to be communicating at least in part.

6. Under Calender, Contacts, Tasks and Notes in Outlook 2011, there appeared the OnMicrosoft heading in addition to the On My Computer heading. All Calender, Contacts, Tasks and Notes under the On My Computer Heading were duplicated under the OnMicrosoft heading.

7. Nevertheless, my Outlook 2011 Calender, Contacts, Tasks are Notes are NOT showing up in Outline 365 online. WHAT AM I MISSING?

8. I have set up Microsoft Exchange account on my iPhone, but given that Outlook 2011 Calender, Contacts, Tasks are Notes have not showed up in my Office 365 online account, I have not been able to sync them with my iPhone.

I would greatly appreciate any advice that you might have.