Sometime you will find the strangest things, where you would have never expected them.
My trusty Outlook client, that connect as much as all my email accounts, calendars, contacts and to-do lists, has this neat little feature called "Social Connector". This enables me to connect to my LinkedIn, Xing or even Facebook contacts by the click of a button within Outlook.
This work quite well. Contacts, I've imported through my social connector where updated automatically, when something had changed.
Then came alot the iOS 5 release with it's nifty little iCloud service. Which sounded great at first. All my email, contacts, calendars, notes could now be synced between Apple devices.
Only that, appart from 2 iPhones and an iPad I didn't own any Apple devices, and my PIM was Outlook.
Fortunately Apple also provides a downloadable iCloud Manager for Windows.
After installing it, I regret it imediatly. All my contacts from outlook had been erazed and replaced by the ones already on my iOS devices. The same for my notes and my tasks. Only, I had not synced any notes and tasks with Outlook before.
So they were all gone.
The second thing I noticed was, that my social connectors didn't seem to work any more. The importet contact list of my social network providers didn't update and new would contacts never show up in the list.
At the end of the last year I moved some of my mail accounts to Microsoft's Office 365, since I was really fed up with the service at GoDaddy, that was unable to get my mailboxes to work at all. To make this deal fit all our requirements I also included parts of my family in this account and gave them each a mailbox.
For some reason, I was the only one, that could not connect the Outlook client with the Exchange servers. No matter what I tried, it would not authenticate to the server, constantly asking me for credentials.
The solution partly came from a newsgrop response, to clear all files from
C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\
What this does is delete all user config files for Outlook. It will not delete any mail account settings.
Open Control Panel > Email
Delete the Exchange Account, if present
Add a new Exchange Account
Start Outlook
which didn't work the first time I've tried.
After some thinking I uninstalled the iCloud Manager and tried again. Bingo!
Just to verify this, I reinstalled iCloud and everything was broken again.
For now, I'm removing iCloud Manager from all my devices and hope, that Apple will learn to write proper and working software in the future, that will not cripple everything else on my computer.
