Outlook for mac 2011 (14.3.9) no longer syncing with ical and address book on OSX Moutain Lion (10.8.5)

I hope someone can shed some light on this. after several days trawling forums and searches, deleting plist files etcI am still none the wiser. 

I have a new iphone on ios7 thats syncing happily with icloud and apple address book and ical on my mac. no problem here at all

the problem comes with outlook 2011 which i love. in previous versions (SP1) i could set up sync services, click sync and hey presto it would swap info with address book and calendar which then in turn would icloud back to the iphone - happy days.

this has now stopped working. I can't tell if this is an error on my part or not but it seems unlikely. Now when i click on the sync button i get a greyed message(no devices syncing) see attached. try as i might i can't get this to revert back to "sync" 

Long story short, if this is an inherent problem with the latest service pack, can i simply uninstall and re-install SP1 which is still available or will i now have to stop using outlook 2011 for mac as its been rendered as much use as a 3 legged donkey. I am reluctant to do so as i feel cloud based mail or mac mail services are both hugely lacking when compared to outlook but what choice is there when it can't update to my other devices?

Moreover is the rumoured outlook for mac 2014 going to re-instate the sync capability?? it seems ludicrous to have it working before then un-do it? surely thats a backwards step in anybody's book??

I hope someone can clear this up for me once and for all

Thanks