Making your life easier…
So much about being a lone consultant is about having your life made easier by technology. More often than not, it transpires against you to make life harder.
With iOS5 launching yesterday, I’ve been keen to find out how iCloud is going to help sync our lives – how helpful would it be to have all contacts and appointments etc on all devices? In addition – I wanted to see how iCloud interact would with Outlook and PC users.
It turns out it’s pretty darn good… oh and it’s all completely free for the first 5GB anyway.
There’s a short demo below – what it actually is… how to set it up… and watch it in action.
hey mark, really useful thanks! was holding off, but that looks incredible.
No worries George – thanks for stopping by. Hope life is treating you well!
Great tutorial and explanation…I some how overlooked all this when I got my phone. I was too geeked up by the siri… LOL. NICE JOB!
Thanks Brian… 4S is on my Xmas list
I may have missed something. From what I could see I now have two calendars in Outlook. What about the invites that come in on the original calendar? How do they get sync’d to the iCloud, so that they will show up on my other devices?
Without that I really don’t have full sync.
Regards, Ken
Great explanation. Question is does it work the same way with synchronizing email?
Hi Ton,
Thank you. Yes it does for Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010 – but not 2003.
Mark
I got frustrated and deleted my Calendar from iCloud. If this works, I’ll turn it on again. Thank you very much for this helpful video.
Thanks for doing this, Mark. I have gone through the steps to install but when doing the first sync I get an error saying “apple outlook dav config has stopped working”. I reinstalled iTunes 64bit to makes sure this was the right version but still get the same error. I have look at discussion groups/support etc but I guess this is all new stuff with iOS5 so will have to wait for someone to figure it out?
Hi Paul – I had this problem too… you’ll find a couple of thousand folks have read my forum post on this – worth checking it out … https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3377753
Thanks for stopping by.
Mark
Hi Paul- hope you can help me with this problem:
- at work we still run XP and Outlook2 2003
- on my iPad i can access all my work Calendar and access as well my business contacts (and work emails)
- at home, i have Win 7 and Oulook 2007
- I have installed the iCloud panel on my home PC
HOWEVER how can I transfer my work calendar and business contacts into the Cloud and into my home PC?
Many thanks
Hi afraid this will only work on Vista upwards and Office 2007 upwards…
Well, it works. But only to find out that this is not the glorieus option I was hoping for.
What is does, is making a secundairie calendar in Outlook and synchronizes form there / to there.
This doesnot help. You can’t accept invitations from a secundairie calender and Outlook does not permit to set the new calender as default.
Against my better judgement : is there a solution for this ?
Wim.
Can anyone jump in and help here?
No solution that I have found. Same issue with contacts. If you refresh your cache or add a new contact in the icloud contacts you can not address an email to them from within outlook mail.
So once you install icloud control pannel and sync the calendar and contacts no longer integrate with the outlook mail system.
I spent several hours on phone to Apple support to only be told that this is the way it is desinged to work.. The good news is that it sync’e really well, it just not that useable.
Anyone else got any comments, workarounds etc that can help.
I manully copy all my contacts so I can send emails..
I have to remember to copy calendar appointments to the icloud calendar so they get synced.
This is not a soluition Apple should be proud of!!!
I like others was excited by the prospect of being able to once again seamless integrate my Outlook 2010 calendar and contacts with my iPhone, without using a Google account as an intermedatory.
I had been able to do this using mobileme until Apple decided to upgrade their calendar and no longer support 64bit outlook synchronizing early in 2011.
However after loading up i cloud and seeing all my contacts and calendar items hijacked into icloud, and not being able to send meeting requests or see who’s responded without using a @me.com email address ( which is not very professional), or use contacts seamlessly with outlook I see once again that this is an example of Apple offering a solution that does not work well within a business environment.
I am very disappointed, and have had to spend hours unpicking the changes, to go back to my Google intermedatory solution that works – all be it not very smoothly.
My plea to apple is please fix this issue. A lot of professionals use outlook to manage our daily business and we love the way the iPhone/iPad works but we also need a reliable solution to integrate them with outlook without hijacking critical business functionality.
Hi Mark, great tutorial. However when I attempt to apply changes in iCloud I get message “active email account in Outlook is required. I have a hotmail address going into outlook can you offer any help. Thanks
Hi,
Using your great tutorial I have been able to set up iCal and iCloud and it now works smoothly. Now I want to move to the next level as an iCloud-user.
I am using Outlook 2011 (14.1.3) on an iMac running Mac OS X 10.7.2.
I would like to sync my tasks in Outlook with iCloud. How can I set that up?
Then I plan to use the Todo app to sync tasks from iCloud to my iPhone.
That should be possible,but how?
Thanks a lot,
Mona
many thanks – very helpful – done in seconds!
Mark, Great video and explanation of how iCloud works. I have a little different situation. I originally setup iCloud using the Outlook Contacts from my iPad which had been manually synced in iTunes. Since then I’ve migrated Outlook to my new iMac into Outlook for Mac and for some reason I can’t get the “master” contact list in my Outlook on the iMac to sync to iCloud. Do you know of any way to delete all the contacts in iCloud and then do a fresh upload from my Outlook? Tried AppleCare a couple of times but the first level tech don’t seem to know iCloud very well. Thx!
I’m having same problem. Have iPad2, iphone 4s and Outlook 2011 running on Lion 10.7.2. All at latest levels. iCloud works fine syncing contacts across iPad, iPhone and Address Book on iMac but cannot get Outlook Contacts to sync. Tried using Outlook Sync Services but no difference. Any ideas?
Amazing Mark, I’ve been trying to find a way to sync my tasks with the iphone, and this was an accidental find on my part. Thanks so much!
does anybody know why my Oulook Calender is so amazing slow? If I want to enter e meeting, the delay is nerving slow and it takes me forever to organize my weekly calender.
All my contacts were moved to iCloud and the local folder is empty.
I use a nearly new and fast computer, Windows 7 prof, Outlook prof 2007 and an iPhone 4S. I have an iPad too, but do not synch this with iCloud as it is so slow.
thanks for help
Looks like I’m having the same problems as Bill T above
I have synced my outlook calender with icloud (as you did in the video) and it works great between my iphone and PC. However, there is still a big issue that I’m having. When someone sends me an outlook invite and I accept that appoint, the appointment goes onto the outlook calender, but not onto the icloud calender. Since most business people still use outlook calenders, it creates an issue where I have two calenders in outlook one in blue (outlook) and one in green (icloud) and the blue calender does not sync with the green. I noticed in your video that you also had the same setup, but never explained how to merge the two. Is there a way to fix this problem?
Has anyone found a way to sync outlook contacts with apple address book? I miss outlook, and can’t find another email program that I like. I am open to any suggestions. thanks.
Lisa, if you need to move from one to the other, you have to find a platform that speaks to each other. When I moved my contacts from another program to back them up, I had to use something found in the the blackberry desktop (an old program I had before my iphone).
I had to import data from groupwise/outlook, into the blackberry desktop, then out again in a format that the mac address book would recognize. I didn’t lose but a birthday or two in the process.
hope that helps.
Anyone have any luck syncing contacts between outlook, mac and iCloud? Or have any suggestions for another email program?
It all sounds great if you’re using all Apple products (in theory). But there’s a HUGE problem of synchronicity between anything Microsoft and anything Apple. I appreciate you suggest here that it all works magnificently between Outlook and iCloud. The fact of the matter is it simply does not, especially if you have a lowly free MSN email account.
The cloud notion has been around for quite a while now. The powers that be at Apple and Microsoft need to sit down with one another and work out a way to overcome their uncomplimentary proprietary software, or both of them are going to lose market share to others with software that is more compatible across devices. I’d happily use a different cloud provider with software that works on all devices for my part.
Brilliantly explained, very good explanation.Thanks Mark