I signed up to Apple’s Mobile Me to get good synchronisation between my iPhone, MacBook and Outlook on my work PC. Its been interesting. I sync my iPhone with my MacBook, but also want to sync my contacts and calendar with my work PC. Perfect scenario for Mobile Me … right?
I think I’ve entered the same contact into my iPhone about three times now … I’m not sure where it goes, but Mobile Me keeps deleting it then syncing with all my devices and deleting it everywhere. Or maybe Outlook is deleting it – but the point is that deleting something seems to work perfectly across all devices, while adding something often leads to a conflict that I have to resolve. Same with calendar appointments – but I think that’s my fault (see below).
This is a problem that I’ve also discovered with Live Mesh. I sync my working folders and have had a feeling of confidence knowing that my files are in three locations. But, over the weekend I discovered how flawed this is when I moved a folder and Mesh deleted it then pushed this out to all of my devices. Mesh was even clever enough to put the folders in my recycle bin, but not the files themself – so the files are successfully deleted from all locations.
Back to Mobile Me – unfortunately it won’t sync with an Outlook calendar that’s stored in Exchange. For a while I’ve been running the Google calendar sync, which works well with Outlook, but Mobile Me won’t sync with Google Calendar either. No problems I thought, so I set up a sync between Google Calendar and iCal on my MacBook – which does sync with Mobile Me.
This is what I’ve ended up with:
Wow – that’s enterprise for you. Hopefully our infrastructure guy will install the Exchange-MobileMe plugin soon so I can sync directly between Exchange and MobileMe, but I’m still left with this feeling of doom that all I’ll achieve is that Mobile Me now has direct access to seemlessly delete stuff from my exchange calendar, iCal and my iPhone.
I’m not complaining – I’ll still have 90% of my appointments on my iPhone and that will be great. If you’re one of the 10% – I apologise in advance.
Cloud storage is great and synchronisation between devices is great too – but nothing beats Time Machine and my trusty external hard-drive.
Posted by Andrew 
