Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Importing a PST file into Outlook 2011 for Mac
Posted by on October 4, 2010
I have been a long-term Outlook user and I’m a serial information hoarder 🙂 so I have a calendar and contact set that goes back a LONG way in time, in a previous life I was also an Exchange/AD consultant so I see the benefits of a server-side mailbox store (centrally held data with local disposable replicas, search, access anywhere etc.).
As well as my work schedule it has all my regular personal appointments, kids school schedules etc. – for simplicity’s sake I only keep one calendar, I don’t have a separate work and personal calendar – your mileage may vary, but this is the way I work.
Having recently moved companies and moved from Wintel/Office to a Mac with the new Outlook 2011 I needed a way of importing my PST-archived calendar to my new Exchange store (calling it a mailbox doesn’t seem to do it justice anymore as it contains calendar, contacts, etc as well now).
I also use a BES-connected Blackberry so I want it to sync my calendar to my device via the BES and a server-side calendar means it’s accessible using OWA from any PC.
This is pretty straightforward for normal Windows Outlook as you just import the .PST and choose the new server-side store/calendar as the target.
However, it seems that the built-in import function in Outlook 2011 won’t import calendar data from a .PST file directly to an Exchange server-side store, it will import it but it only keep it in a separate locally held calendar, nor can you cut & paste or sync or do anything to move the contents from “calendar – on my computer” into the server-side calendar.
My “VMware calendar” (note: not my capitalization :)) is the server-side one but I can’t import directly to it, it always goes into “On my computer” which I can only assume is held somewhere client-side.
Whilst I can select both (as shown above) and they get overlaid on the calendar view this is only accessible when I use my Mac and thus won’t be available via OWA, or on my Blackberry.
So – the only solution I found was to use a Windows VM under Fusion with Office 2010 installed and use it to import my calendar contents, thus it synced back down to my Outlook 2011 offline store and onwards to my Blackberry via the BES.
This seemed a sort of backwards process so I would love to know if anyone has found a better native way to do this….?
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 
try this:
right click on the calendar
select sharing permissions
in the “Folder Properties: Calendar” pop up window select the “General” tab at the top left.
Then select Empty to empty the cache…
worked for me.
For what it’s worth, I have this same exact problem, and will probably do what you suggest to fix it, however backwards it is. Thanks!
you can do it.. what you have to do is sort the calendar by category view, hit command+a to select all the calendar entries and then drag them up to the exchange calendar. i know this works, because i did it.