iCloud is not ready for primetime or suitable for business use.

iCloud service interuptionIn the past couple of days I’ve had multiple clients call me to complain about problems with iCloud.    I see that they had a major outage again yesterday, and this has not unfortunately proven to be rare occurrence for the service.

These particular clients use scenario is that they are trying to use iCloud to synchronize Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and notes between their Apple iOS devices and their business computers that use Outlook.   Yesterday’s outage aside iCloud just does not play well with Outlook.

At this point, I’m basically just telling clients to avoid iCloud in the use scenario, and not consider it service that is worthy of business consideration.     The fact of the matter is that Apple has not been very successful in email and Cloud services going back over half a decade.   .Mac email was very unreliable, MobileMe synching never really worked well, and now we have iCloud which in my opinion is still not ready for prime time.

If you want seamless synching of Outlook and iOS, and your goal is to use this for business then my recommendation is go with a Hosted Exchange plan utilizing your company domain name.    iKnowTech resells hosted Exchange mailboxes from Rackspace, who I’ve found to be the most reliable service provider for this service, they also have some of the best tech support available on the off chance you’ll ever need it, although I never have.

If you want seamless over the air synching of email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes between all your devices be it Outlook, Mac Mail, iCal, iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry (does anyone still use BlackBerry?) this is the only solution I recommend.