For all Salesforce for Outlook and Salesforce Connect for Outlook users, and anyone planning on using Apple’s iCloud service to sync their Outlook contacts, we’d like to warn you of a serious problem experienced by one of our seasoned Salesforce support specialists.
Here’s his story:
I just installed Apple’s iCloud control panel onto my Windows 7 computer with Microsoft Outlook 2010 and came across some issues that I thought you should be aware of. I thought this would be a simple synchronizing tool like Salesforce for Outlook, or even the sync options in iTunes for my iPhone but I wrong!
I installed it the other day and when I opened Outlook 2010 this morning, my Google Calendar Sync tool popped up and said that over 300 events had been removed from my Outlook Calendar and did I want to delete them from my Google calendar.
Since I did not knowingly remove any events, I said no and started to investigate.
As it turned out, the Apple iCloud functionality does not sync contacts and calendar items from Outlook; it removes them from your default folders and adds them to your new iCloud folders. Talk about a rude awakening! My main calendar and contact folders in Outlook were empty!
After doing some Google searching on “iCloud deleted my Outlook Contacts” and “iCloud deleted my Outlook calendar items”, I found that this was by design. It sure would have been nice if Apple told me about this before I messed up my Microsoft Outlook data.
Since iCloud moved all of my Outlook calendar items, I could no longer sync with my Google calendar, since the tool uses your default folder. Since my default Outlook contacts folder was emptied as well, which was syncing to my iPhone through iTunes, my contacts in my iPhone wanted to go away as well. Needless to say, I turned off calendar and contact syncing through iCloud in Windows and my iPhone. I had not yet installed it on my Mac.
For those of you that are using Salesforce and are using one of the syncing tools (Connect for Outlook or Salesforce for Outlook), be warned. If you are syncing both ways and using the default Outlook folders, iCloud will empty those folders. Then, the Salesforce sync tool sees your contacts and events as deleted so it will attempt to delete those same items in Salesforce.
Luckily, I am in support so I am not syncing Outlook contacts with my Salesforce but it took quite a while to put everything back and get Google calendar syncing working again. If iCloud does delete your Salesforce items, you can restore them from the Salesforce recycle bin.
As for restoring your Outlook, please see the posts in the Google search terms above for the instructions. They vary based on which version of Outlook you are using.
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