Outlook.com Calendar birthdays sync issue

Hi lamé,

Thank you for the detailed information that you have provided. On the first set of instructions that you have given (1-8). I noticed that is by design that the birthday of that contact will not re-appear on the Birthday calendar since the event is manually deleted.

To make the birthday re-appear again, you need to manually re-add the birthday of that contact on the Birthday calendar. To create a birthday event, just click the drop down button beside New and select Birthday.

Now, on the second set of instructions, we need to refresh the Birthday calendar to have it updated with People. Therefore after 9-12, there is a 13th step that we need to.

13. Click the cog icon located at the upper right of calendar .

   13.1. Click Options.

   13.2. Select Birthday calendar under Edit your reminder and calendar settings.

   13.3. Under Last refreshed select Refresh now.

Go back to your Birthday calendar and it should include the birthday of the re-added contact.

Hope this helps, if you have further query please let us know.

Thank you.

Hi Neil,

Thanks for your note. However, I do not think these are acceptable solutions.

Concerning steps 1-8

If I add a new birthday on the Birthday Calendar for every contact in my People list that doesn't show the Birthday date (as I understand you are suggesting), I will end up with many "double" contacts. Indeed, as I already stated earlier in this thread: "If I add a birthday in Calendar, and the name I enter matches someone in my contact list, the birthday willNOT be added to their contact, but instead, a new contact duplicate will be created in People.")

Please note again that, even in the case this was the intended way Microsoft wants the Birthday Calendar to work, it does not comply with the description it gives of the service:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/outlook/calendar-add-birthdays

"If you add a birthday in Calendar, and the name you enter matches someone in your contact list, the birthday will be added to their contact."

I understand the current design has its logic (If I delete manually something it shall not reappear automatically) but some kind of work around should be provided to "reset" the manual deletion, in the case the user wants the Birthday displayed again in the Calendar. I think this could and should be made possible at least in two ways (but I am sure that there are better ones that you can think of):

1. For the single People entry: by adding some sort of refresh button when you edit a People entry, or an automatic refresh when the Birthday date info is edited (re-entered).
2. It could also be as simply as adding a check box “Show on my Birthday Calendar” right after the birthday date entered in People!!
3. For the entire Birthday Calendar: by resetting ALL the stored information of the Birthday Calendar when the Calendar is deleted, in order to have the ENTIRE Calendar re-populated when recreated. The current behaviour of this feature is unfortunately different. Indeed, the deletion of the Calendar doesn’t reset the “blocked” Birthdays (this is a particularly odd behaviour for a RESET function in my humble opinion): the missing Birthdays are still missing after I have performed the deletion/recreation of the Calendar.

 Concerning steps 1-13

The refreshes of the calendar do not make the contact birthday re-appear as a rule, even if the contact has been deleted and re-entered. Even in this case, the information / the bug that causes the missing of birthday events appears to be stored somewhere (e.g. you can re-add the deleted contacts in People, it could be that the information is stored there and permanently connected to the name of the contact.)

As someone else underlined, an unreliable birthday Calendar is almost useless, even if the number of birthdays it is missing are a small percentage of the total. Please, escalate this problem.

Thank you,

lamé

Hi m@rk,

Thank you for patiently waiting for an update.

I have replied to your private message. Kindly make sure that you're currently signed in to view my response.

Hi WhiteBahamut,

Thank you for getting back to us.

I have replied to your private message. Kindly make sure that you're currently signed in to view my response.

@ Fred,

Welcome to Microsoft Community forum!

I understand that you also need help to fix the birthday Calendar issue you've experienced on your account.

Please be advised that we're asking some information to other customers in the private communication area to protect the privacy of their personal data and provide them with the best personal support possible. We just want to make sure that only Moderators and the customer can view the response.

In the meantime, kindly provide us the following information so we can also conduct a thorough investigation on your concern:

• Your affected Microsoft account
• Screenshot of your Outlook.com Calendar indicating the exact issue

I've provided a private message where you can input the requested information in a private and secure way. Please make sure that you are currently signed in to view the private message and reply on this post to notify us that the required information has been provided.

We look forward to your response on this matter.

@ RalphLea_771,

Thank you for your feedback regarding this matter.

Rest assured that we will do all our best to help all our customers on every Outlook.com issues they may encounter.

@FredLussier:  We can not fix this problem ourselves.  This problem is described in several active threads and from several users.  In this thread alone, the problem was described as far back as June.  It is not a matter of us doing something wrong or having inconsistent data.  This is obviously a program error. 

In my opinion, several moderators are working on this problem without coordinating their efforts with each other.  That is why they keep privately contacting users. I only hope that the appropriate escalation has been made to the development team and that development is aware of the problem.

They need to know that it is a general problem, not relating to a user's account, choice of browser or contact data.

I have the same issue.

Here are Outlook.com features for what concerns Birthday as listed in http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/outlook/calendar-add-birthdays

Calendar is connected to your contact list in People

• If you add a birthday to a contact in People, the birthday will be added to your calendar.
• If you add a birthday in Calendar, and the name you enter matches someone in your contact list, the birthday will be added to their contact.
• If you add a birthday in Calendar, and the person isn't in your contact list, they'll be added.

Here is my user experience with these features:

• If I add a birthday to a contact in People, the birthday will be added to my calendar most of times. For some reasons, some contacts birthday in People will not show in the Birthday Calendar, regardless of time for sync, syncing manually, deleting and re-adding the birthday in People.
• If I add a birthday in Calendar, and the name I enter matches someone in my contact list, the birthday will NOT be added to their contact, but instead, a new contact duplicate will be created in People.
• If I add a birthday in Calendar, and the person isn't in my contact list, they'll be added. This works just fine, but I find it the least desidarable feature of the three: what if I just want to remember a birthday and do not want that person as a contact? - i.e. Small kids, very old aunts, my favourite novel author, etc.

Are there any actions, that I am not aware of, I could do to have all People's birthdays synced with the Birtday Calendar?

Thanks for your attention.

Francesco

hi!

I've exactly have the same problem here.

The sync feature doesn't work for some contacts.

Hi,

I have the same user experience issue.

Need Help.

Message for the moderator : why an answer in private message, this issue look like a general issue.

Just give us a clear answer how to fix the problem.

You can't fix this issue user by user, this is a non-sense

thanks