Unable to Sync Calendars & Contacts with iCloud

[Max Reheat]

I've upgraded my iMac to Lion and various devices to iOS 5. Here is the problem...
It took lots of button pushing to get the Calendars on my iPhone but I cannot get them on my wife's. We have a MobileMe family pack, giving us two separate email addresses.
Additionally, I can't get the Contacts list to update on either phone. The emails work OK though.
Can anyone help, please?

 

[d21mike]

So you did not switch to iCloud (i.e. you did not do http://www.me.com/move). If so, then go to http://www.me.com and verify that everything is accurate (this is very important). If it is good there then go into Settings / Mail,Contacts,Calendar and turn off Contact Sync and it should ask if you want to delete the Contacts on your phone. Answer yes and wait a minute. Then turn it back on and it should download your contacts from me.com within a minute or so. Do the same for the Calendars. Of course verify you have the correct userid/password.

 

[Max Reheat]

Hi d21
Yes I forgot to add that we had changed everything to iCloud also.
It's just not doing what I expected and I now find that changes I make to the calendar on my iPhone will not update the calendar on my iMac.
It's really frustrating. I know there must be a very simple solution but it's not clearly obvious to me at the moment.

 

[d21mike]

So since you are on iCloud and then go to http://www.icloud.com and check the calendar (that is the master copy). Make sure that it is correct because if not the problem is between the iPhone and iCloud. If it is there then the problem is with the Mac Calendar not getting the new event from iCloud.com. I just did a test myself to see if I noticed the same problem and I did. When I put in an event in the Mac Calendar it showed up within seconds on the iPhone but not the other way around. I went to http://www.icloud.com to verify the event was there from the iPhone and it was. But after waiting a few minutes it still did not show up on my Mac Calendar. So I then closed my Mac Calendar and then restarted and the event showed up. I normally do not check my other devices right away so I am not really sure how long it takes to get there but maybe there is some kind of delay. Anyway, that is the method I use to debug these kind of problems.

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Just checked on my Mac Calendar Preferences under Accounts and it has Refresh Calendars set to Push (other options are to refresh every so many minutes). I assume based on my test that the Push Logic is not working very reliable.

 

[Max Reheat]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for all this.
Ok, so overnight my iMac has updated, so as you say there is some kind of delay in the updating process... I can live with that.

My major problem is my wife's iPhone and the iCloud calendar (I'll try to deal with the contacts book later).
We have a family pack MobileMe account. My email address is the primary, I guess, then one for my wife and another general one.
I have deleted all the accounts on her phone and then tried each one individually. The extra problem is that when her phone is logged on to either of the other accounts that she only gets their emails and not her own. I hope I am making this clear.
So, when her phone is logged on to her account the calendar does not update. Additionally, I have logged onto her iCloud account on the Mac and the calendar there is not updated either. So clearly the problem is in getting her iCloud account to see the changes.
I just don't know what to do... I am sure that it being Apple that the problem resides with me but I can't see it at the moment.
Thanks for any help you can give.
Max

 

[d21mike]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Did you do a wew.me.com/move for each of you MobileMe Family Accounts? That would have created multiple iCloud Accounts for email, contacts, calendar etc. Rhen you use each account on each persons phone. You debug the same way by looking at wew.icloud.com for each account. They are completely separate accounts. This was the same under MobileMe but you paid for them under a family plan.

 

[Max Reheat]

Thanks Mike,
I think I'm getting there... slowly.
It seems the work around I have found is that if I put my work schedule in as a monthly calendar, then I have to allow my wife to share it, whereas in the past we would just hardwire sync each phone with the computer.

Thanks for all your help.

Max