Users of Apple’s MobileMe have put up with a lot over the past couple of weeks since the service was launched. Many of these problems have to do with the availability of the service; for example, as I’m writing this, a number of people have been without access to their MobileMe e-mail accounts for several days. That’s bad, to be sure, but it seems like the kind of problem that Apple will correct pretty soon.

One of the latest shoes to drop, however, is the apparent lack of support for syncing with Microsoft Outlook calendars that are hosted on Exchange servers. A big part of the MobileMe vision was that you could install some software on your Windows-based PC, and sync your Outlook calendars with the same cloud of data that all of your other devices (such as your MacBook and iPhone) were synched to. And depending on who you ask, this seems to be working if you’re operating Outlook in “stand-alone” mode (as most home users presumably do).

Those of us who are using Outlook at work, however, tend to have Outlook hooked up to an Exchange server, so that we can share calendars and contacts and what-not with our co-workers. I (and apparently many others) have been struggling with this configuration, trying to get it to work. For me particularly, it’s the calendars that just don’t seem to sync at all. I have a default calendar (named “Calendar”) in Outlook, and that’s the one that all of my work events get scheduled on. I couldn’t figure out how to sync this one to Mobile Me at all. The additional calendars that I’ve created seemed to sync properly at first, but now it seems that events that I add to those calendars in Outlook never get pushed up to the MobileMe server (and thus they never appear on any of my other copies of those calendars).

Given all of the other MobileMe snafus that people have been dealing with since the launch, it was easy for me to assume that this was just another thing that Apple didn’t quite have working right, which would be repaired in short-ish order. More recent posts on Apple’s support forums suggest, however, that not only is this not going to be fixed, but that it’s this way by design.

Apple has already had to issue one major mea culpa regarding their false advertising of push capability for the desktop clients of MobileMe. As more people become aware of the “resolution” of this Exchange-synching problem, confidence in MobileMe is only going to lessen.

Come on, Google. Give us push-synching of our Google e-mail, calendars and contacts. If it works, I’ll even give you the $99 a year I might have paid Apple for MobileMe.