MobileMe does NOT do Windows

MobileMe has gotten a lot of bad press since it's introduction. Initially over service unavailability and instability. I never had too much trouble in that regards. But it's claim of working with Outlook on Windows is very nearly unfounded. I'm not saying it is impossible to get it to work but it is improbable for a tinkerer to get it working and impossible for the average "Joe/Jane". This is one of the latest threads over at Apple documenting the mess.

I'm a software R&D guy myself so I am familiar with the many challenges in producing large scale commercial products. For this reason I am often a lot more tolerant of issues I see. But in this case I can only conclude serious irresponsibility or incompetence was at play.

First, MobileMe on Windows will not work through a standard company firewall. At all. Now, there is nothing in the docs to say it will work. But that is no defense. Any use case around Outlook has to assume the user is on a corporate network. Now, I'd be willing to work around this but for the even worse defect - even on a completely open internet connection MobileMe syncing from Windows just DOES NOT work. Worse yet there are no error messages or any other helpful feedback on what is going wrong and/or why. This is a feature that is claimed to be supported. Worser and worser is Apple's silence about the problem happily letting its customers thrash around wasting time and energy on what is documented as a simple "for the rest of us" feature that is an unmitigated disaster. If you poke around the support threads you will see a few people say they "finally" got it to work (without a firewall/proxy) but there is always a caveat like "except for calendar syncing" or some such. You can be sure that if any of the kludge solutions posted was fully functional Apple would long ago have published a FAQ or Knowledge Base article with the solution.

Very hard to take Apple seriously in the enterprise software space given the severity of this issue and their response - or rather complete lack of substantive response. I still love my iPhone and am using MobileMe from my Mac. But I am completely warning my Windows-using friends away from MobileMe.

N.B. I am using Google's calendar sync app for Outlook as a kludge solution for calendar access. This has a lot of failings but at least it does allow me to view my work calendar from my iPhone...