MobileMe & Outlook - Birthdays

When I setup MobileMe, it took all of my birthdays and moved them to a separate calendar called "Birthdays". I didn't sweat it too much at the time, but knew that because they were not included on my primary Outlook calendar, I wouldn't get alerts before they occurred.

Later, I also discovered that the birthdays in the "Birthday calendar" were not actually sychronizing with Outlook anymore. In fact, although there were birthdays showing up on me.com/calendar, they did not appear in Outlook anymore.

Rather than going crazy worrying about the sync of Birthdays, I simply re-created them manually in Outlook, and rather than using the word "Birthday", which I worried would cause them to go to the "Birthday calendar", I used "BDay". I also made them recurring for 9 years only.

So far so good.

Outlook 2003 was showing TWO instances of my PST...

I use Outlook 2003 very extensively, and was unaware that it suddenly started showing two instances of my "Personal Folders" file.

The two data sources didn't show in the "Mail" control panel item, so I couldn't remove the second one. Within Outlook, I couldn't close the second one.

Normally this wouldn't cause a problem, and it didn't - EXCEPT for the auto-backup add-in. It saw two identical PST's, and chose to ignore BOTH of them.

Here's what I did to fix it.

I created a new profile, and redirected that profile to use the original PST file.

I then re-entered all 11 email accounts, and everything's okay now.

MobileMe sucks

I just tried using MobileMe, and the first thing it did was create two calendars in my Outlook, labeled "Work" and "Home". There's just one problem. I use the default calendar and keep everything there. Lame. I cancelled it immediately, so I didn't have to pay $60 for such garbage.

iPhone 2.0.1 firmware update helps, but...

The 2.0.1 firmware update released last night seems to help a little:
- faster backups and sync
- most things on phone respond faster
- phone seems a bit more stable

My biggest gripe about the sync process is that it doesn't seem to confirm changes to Outlook data. That being said, it seems to be making those decisions correctly.

So far, I'm very happy.

iTunes 7.7.1 improves backup

I just installed iTunes 7.7.1. It seems to speed up the backup.

I don't know if it improves anything else...

Got an iPhone, but...

I just got an iPhone 3G!

Overall, I'm loving it!

But, I want to use it for my calendar and to replace my Pocket PC.

It's supposed to synchronize with Outlook 2003 out of the box.

Initially, it seemed to do just that. However, apparently there's at least a few hitches. It looks like there's a problem with recurring appointments (like birthdays).

I've already had to clear it out and restore it from scratch. I'll be watching very closely over the next few days.

Let's just say I'm not gonna be selling my Pocket PC just yet.