iCloud and Outlook: Installation Order Matters!

Nice work, nVidia. Today marks the third time in three years I’ve had to send my Mac back to Apple to replace one of your faulty GPUs. What the hell happened?

I spent the morning setting up an old Windows box so I can at least keep up on e-mail while my Mac gets a less-broken logic board. Figured this would be a good chance to checkout iCloud on Windows, so I downloaded it, installed it, and then installed Outlook 2010. Went into the iCloud control panel, told it to synchronize my Outlook Contacts, and… no. Got this useful error instead:

Error: 0x8004010F: ZebraMapiCopySession::CreateMobileMeMessageStore: CreateMessageService failed

What the hell does that mean? Turns out, it means that you shouldn’t install Outlook after iCloud; you need to install Microsoft Office first. Uninstalling and then re-installing iCloud fixed the problem. Now I’ve got my calendar, contacts, and e-mail all showing up nicely in Outlook. Which would be awesome, except—it’s still Outlook.

And Apple? Your error messages could use some work…