You have an iPhone and you want to take advantage of Apple's MobileMe wireless syncing service, but you've been using Microsoft Outlook for years and have your calendar and contact information just the way you want it. MobileMe is designed to play nice with Outlook, but how do you get your personal Outlook data to that  cute little MobileMe Cloud?

I recently set out to do just that, and at first I was stumped.  Setting up MobileMe on the iPhone was a breeze, but I was warned that using MobileMe's contacts and calendar syncing features would erase the that data which was already synced to my iPhone. 

Before we begin...

You can configure Outlook to interface your email from MobileMe so that you can use it to send and receive email the way you would with any other email account, but setting up a MobileMe account in Outlook does not sync your contacts or calendar entries.

Aside from setting up your @me.com email account in Outlook (if you want to do so, of course), you also need to sync the calendar and contact information with MobileMe; once you've done this, you can change entries on your iPhone, the MobileMe web interface or Outlook, and have those changes mirrored in the other two locations.  Let's get started.

MobileMe On Your PC

For the purposes of this tutorial, I'm going to assume you already have a MobileMe account (if not, you can get the service for nearly half price here) and that you have iTunes installed on your PC. I'm also going to assume that you want your contacts and/or calendar entries currently stored in Outlook to be copied to MobileMe.

When you install iTunes on your PC, another utility was placed in your Windows Control Panel. This utility, aptly named MobileMe, allows you to set how your PC interacts with the MobileMe service.  In Classic View, the MobileMe icon appears in the list of Control Panel options; in new standard view, it's in the Network & Internet submenu:

The MobileMe Preferences Utility

When you open the MobileMe Preferences utility, you'll see three tabs: Account, Sync & iDisk. The first and third tabs are useful, but for our purposes, you just need the Sync tab.

The settings in the Sync tab govern how MobileMe communicates with your PC.  Check the box that reads Sync with MobileMe and select how you'd like to sync.  You can do it automatically, manually or at different time intervals.

Below this section is the syncing options box; here you instruct MobileMe whether or not to sync calendar entries, contacts and bookmarks between MobileMe and your PC.  Check the Contacts and Calendar boxes.  To the right of each is a drop down menu allowing you to select which application you'd like to sync to and from.  If you're an Outlook user, you'll probably want to go with Outlook, but you can also select other Windows applications or even web services from Yahoo! and Google:

Once you've set your contacts and calendar entries to be synced with Outlook, click the Sync button. If you're new to MobileMe, when you see a window asking how you'd like data written, choose for Outlook to overwrite the data on MobileMe.  Your Outlook contacts and appointments are now available online and to sync with your iPhone.

iPhone Syncing

Now your contact and calendar data are mirrored between Outlook and MobileMe.  You can now sync your iPhone with MobileMe, have it overwrite the calendar and contact information you had synced with Outlook, and you'll still have the same entries.

Other Thoughts

Syncing is confusing.  Every mobile device user knows that it's also far from perfect.  However, MobileMe seems to handle this quite well, and after a bumpy start in mid 2008, the service seems to be working as advertised.