Why Businesses Can't Use iCal & MobileMe

Earlier this week, I received an alert from Apple via Me.com that I had to upgrade my MobileMe calendar to the newer version because they have stopped syncing my information. Upgrading virtually made iCal a lot less useful for business purposes since the upgrade disables the ability to send iCal calendar invitations from your work email.

On May 14th, Apple sent me an email that read:

Upgrade to the new MobileMe Calendar to restore calendar syncing and web access

Over the past few months, we let you know that a new version of MobileMe Calendar was available and that it was important for you to upgrade to it. Because you have not upgraded to the new MobileMe Calendar, you currently can’t sync your calendars to your devices or view them via the web at me.com.

So that night I upgraded my calendars, although it only worked using Safari, it did work and it seemed like I had no issues. All my calendar events upgraded without a glitch and even my subscribed calendars all worked. A huge relief for someone who uses the calendar heavily for my day to day meetings and calls.

It wasn't until the next day when I started to notice a major issue. At first, I was unable to modify my existing calendar events. Then when I sent out new invitations for new meetings, I noticed they were being sent by my MobileMe email and not my work email, so from username@me.com versus name@rustybrick.com. How unprofessional!

I figured there was a setting or something to change this, so I checked the help documents which said iCal sends invites from your default email account. My default email account is my work email. So I figured I was doing something terribly wrong.

Next stop, Apple Support. I first called but then was directed to the online support named Express Lane, where you can do an online chat with a MobileMe support rep. There I learned that the answer was not so simple. Ultimately telling me that "it seems that you are no longer able to send calendar invitations of your MobileMe calendar using third party emails. You are only able to use your MobileMe username to send out the calendar invitations." It seems that way?

So now my only choice, if I want to sync multiple calendars on multiple devices, is to switch to Google Calendar so I can properly send and accept calendar invitations without it looking like I am a high schooler (i.e. sending and receiving work calendars via mobileme's email at username@me.com.

I seriously hope Apple reconsiders this within the next few days before I make a huge switch over to Google - like they care anyway.

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