"MobileMe mystifies me. It managed to screw up the calendar on my laptop when I tried to sync it to my iPhone. MobileMe needs to consolidate its interface. It's all over the place. If that wasn't bad enough, after my upgrade to Snow Leopard and the last iPhone software upgrade, I can no longer sync my Entourage calendar to my phone with the wire at all. So for a calendar on my iphone, I've got bupkiss. Yuk!"
Nobody with an iPhone should have to put with with bupkiss on their calendar, even if they're using a Microsoft calendar on their Apple computer. So I thought I'd look into this.
Online sources, including Apple and Microsoft, tell you this should work. And with Mac stuff, you can generally believe it. It, as they say, just works. So I downloaded a free trial copy of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, set up Entourage, and tried to sync. "Just" four hours later, I got results.
So what I can tell you, Ellie, is you don't have to put up with this. It should work. I got it to work. Not perfect, but better than 'sort of.' And I got it to sync calendar stuff in 'real time' over the Internet without having to plug my iPhone into my Mac and iTunes.
So you can fix this. But the deal is, you will have to do this on your own, or work with a geek friend. Your local Mac Genius does not support Entourage, I'm told. You may have some luck with Apple's phone troubleshooting, based on the information on this Apple support page.
If you're inclined to try this at home, here are some ideas:
- Make sure your Apple, iPhone and Microsoft software is all up to date. Duh.
- Make sure your MobileMe account is set up.
- Make sure your Entourage calendar is set up to sync to MobileMe. MAKE SURE YOU PAY CAREFUL ATTENTION TO THE PROMPT ABOUT REPLACING YOUR DATA SO THAT YOU DON'T WIPE EVERYTHING OUT! [Ellie, this may be the step that got screwed up when you upgraded to Snow Leopard.]
- Make sure your iPhone is set up to sync to MobileMe.
- Try publishing your Entourage calendar to MobileMe. This step shouldn't be needed, but for some reason it made a difference.
- If everything's hooked up right, your iPhone calendar App should have a calendar named 'Entourage' in it.
- You can also get help from Microsoft, or at least find some company for your misery. They have a forum thread called 'iCal sync does not work in Entourage 2008.' Even though it does work. Better than sort of.
- After you've gone through the exercise and proved that it works, dump the Microsoft stuff and switch to Apple's iCal … much nicer program, and it syncs more reliably to your phone.
- I kid. I'm a kidder.