Outlook.com Calendar birthdays sync issue

@DedeLandry don't even try the suggestions.  This problem has been known by Microsoft for a long time now.  This thread was reported in May 2014!  There are several other threads also dealing with this issue.  Microsoft has no priority in resolving the issue.  Apparently my info was sent to Support at the end of Sept.  I am still waiting.

The only way to resolve this issue is to remove the linking of 3rd party contacts (i.e. Facebook and Skype) from your account and to maintain all birthday reporting in Outlook contacts. 

Delete and then recreate your birthday calendar after disabling the 3rd party linking. 

All of the Outlook birthdays will appear in your calendar.  Birthdays are not lost if only Outlook account exists.

P.S.To refresh the birthday calendar:

  Choose "Options" from the Settings Menu.  

  Choose "Birthday Calendar".

  "Refresh now" is a link under the "Last refreshed" entry.

I have the same problem.  I followed the steps above but could not find the words "Refresh now".  I spent an hour on the phone with tech support for Microsoft.  The tech person had no idea what I was talking about.  This seems to be a big problem why aren't tech people aware of it.

On a rainy day, could you (or others with this automatic birthday calendar trouble) please test the following?

Shut down the phone and any applications using live.com i.e. Windows Live mail.

Log in to people.live.com

Unlink the connection to Twitter, Facebook etc.

On people.live.com select all the local contacts and create a .csv backup from the menu.

Store the backup safely!

Select all the local contacts on people.live.com and delete all.

Select calendar.live.com and remove the automatic birthday calendar from the settings.

Log out from live.com

Create a copy of the contacts .csv file (for safety) and inspect the copy for weird characters, erroneous extra white space, and that the contacts birthdays appear correctly in i.e. Notepad. It looks a bit messy, and this step can be omitted if you are not sure what I am talking about. The file looked OK in my case.

Log in to people.live.com

The contacts list should appear empty, with an import option at the bottom.

Import the contacts from the backup .csv file - the guide asks if everything looks OK and also have an option to merge duplicates. Inspect and complete the import.

Select calendar.live.com and enable the Birthday calendar.

Select the main calendar and check that the contacts birthdays appear. It may take a minute or two to refresh - or it can be forced to refresh from the settings menu as discussed previously.

Log out from live.com

Start up the phone

In settings -> mail + accounts - long press the Microsoft account and select sync, if it is not sync'ing already. It takes a while to complete.

The contacts and birthdays of the contacts on the phone should now appear correctly.

Notice: The carefully collected thumbnail images of my local contacts are gone after this.

The automatic birthday calendar now works as advertised for me during a week and lots of sync'ing and testing on live.com, on the phone, and in Windows Live Mail: New contacts with birthday details appear in the calendar automatically, and changes to existing contacts also reflects in the automatic birthday calendar.

I still have no idea what caused the flaw to appear in the first place after working correctly for months, so it may prove a tough one to debug in the Microsoft labs (and I will let you know if/when it comes back) .

Now link Twitter, Facebook etc. back to the Microsoft account from mail + accounts, showing "Attention required" or from the guide on people.live.com if you want.

Please report back later if you went for this drastic step, both if successful and also if it did not work for you?

Disclaimer: Always store an extra backup of everything important.

--

Hans

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.

I agree with Ralph, you have not fixed this problem.  You are manually maintaining your Birthdays.

Another fact: as you can see from the post above, if, by chance, you deleted one birthday event from your Outlook.com Birthday Calendar, you will never be able to display that birthday again by refreshing the Contact details. Your only option is to re-add the Birthday manually, which in turn will create a duplicate Contact. This is just plain bad design. You cannot bypass this design flaw even if you delete the entire calendar and then recreate it, since this operation does not reset your manual edits on the Birthday Calendar itself. This is another non-smart design: if you give a reset option, let it be a real reset!

I repeat what I have reported six months ago. This is the description of the how the Birthday Calendar should work, as described by Microsoft Outlook.com user reference online (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 is not in your contact list, they'll be added.

If these three plain simple, very reasonable, features worked as described, 50% of the problems in this forum would be solved. Unfortunately, only the third feature listed works flawlessly, in my user experience.

The second feature does not exist at all, so why list it? Adding a birthday in Calendar with a name that matches someone in your contact list will simply create a duplicate Contact: you will have one contact with email/telephone/ etc. data; and a contact with the same name, and showing only the birthday date.

The first feature listed generally works. However, as I said, if you manually deleted the birthday event from your Calendar, you will not be able to re-add it from the contact in People. This, and the impossibility to perform a real reset of your Birthday Calendar can create missing birthdays.

Please note that I am only reporting problems related to the Outlook.com standalone contacts. If Outlook.com can't manage optimally it's own contacts/birthdays, by simply doing what it describe in its own user guide, it's hard to imagine how it could manage birtdays events from third party services .

As other users stated it multiple times, you getting access to one account at a time or sending private messages can’t solve these issues. The Designers Team can solve this, by editing (very simple edits, I think) the code of Outlook.com Birthday Calendar.

Thank you and Best Regards.

There is also a german topic for this problem (http://answers.microsoft.com/de-de/outlook_com/forum/ocalendar-obirthday/geburtstag-aus-kalender-verschwunden-nach/769682db-d4c9-48b3-b0d6-b1d0931a7c37?page=5&tm=1415905623656) .

An MS account stated that they are working on a solution... hope they ensure the three mentioned rules are working. They are simple and this is what I would expect.

Not really a fix, but it works for me. Anyway I don't have any 3rd party contacts, not even a facebook account and I still have this problem.