Exporting MobileMe Contacts into Outlook

Question

I've just been through a bit of wringer with this! :-)

I have a client with a MobileMe account and about 350+ contacts in there. He asked me to see if there was "an easy way" to copy the contacts from MobileMe into Outlook 2011 (Mac).

My background is primarily Windows-centric so I researched possibilities this way.

The first thing I did was export all the contacts from me.com into a multi-vcard file. I found out quickly that Outlook doesn't support importing multi-vcard formatted files. I found applications that would do it, but I preferred to stay away from buying something if possible.

So, I happened upon an Apple KB article about syncing with Outlook. It looked dead-on-simple. Turn on the option and away one goes. I did this on a Windows machine with Outlook 2010 x64.

Welll, it didn't turn out to be that simple.

What ultimately happened is that any MobileMe contact information that didn't conform neatly to Outlook's built-in fields was simply lost. This was a bit of a disaster since that malformed data then neatly (and succinctly) synced BACK INTO MOBILEME and spread it's erased mischievousness across the client's iPhone and three other Macs.

I had made a backup, so I've just finished restoring the original exported data. It's not perfect. Group memberships and contact photos were lost, but the client is not worried about those things.

So, I'm doing now what I, perhaps, should have asked in the first place. Can I accomplish the original goal?

I am loathe to reconnect MobileMe and Outlook through any sort of sync partnership. I have the original exported vCard but I still have the issue of fields within the vCards that do not conform to Outlook fields.

Has anyone else successfully done this? Any tips?

Cheers,

M