Outlook.com Calendar birthdays sync issue

There is no doubt that live.com has several issues, like saving a .csv People backup with birthday dates in local format (15-05-1959 in Denmark) instead of the proper ISO date format (1959-05-15) is enough to give me nerdy tics.

The post from HarryHerlin explains the trouble I had with the automatic birthdays during the summer and fall 2014, after creating a group of best friends on the Windows phone and missing those people's birthdays later - but it is not the current behaviour on my Microsoft account. It is now stable for a month.

The error on my account was never a birthday roulette, it was a case of certain people's birthdays missing.

I'm happy to help investigate and escalate this, but it must be a reproducible error on a fresh test account.

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Hans

Microsoft is not taking this seriously, so I suggest that everyone who hasn't done so already:

• refers an Answer Tech to this thread on http://support.microsoft.com/ContactUs/TechnicalSupport (Outlook.com)
• reports the problem on https://status.live.com/report?productid=cal (Something else)
• clicks on 'Me Too' under 'Had this question' next to the original post

Any other routes? :)

I just permitted to post a corresponding comment on "Blogging Windows", where Windows 10 gets big hype and attention preliminary, encouraging everyone here to follow:

http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2014/12/17/december-update-on-the-windows-insider-program/#comment-14921

It makes no sense obviously.

I've send several feedbacks via calender feedback and nothing has been happened since then.

It is hard to believe that such big company like MS has lack of software developers to fix this obvious bug. Most propably that product management have set wrong priorities to devs. Or community management haven't raised that issue with proper priority to product management.

Nevertheless either management decision has been wrong or communication between Community <-> ProductManagers <-> Devs has been broken somewhere.

That is how brilliant idea with people and calendar hubs can be defiled by buggy realization.

If community will be ignored further - people simply will choose other better services. Like it was with many MS products before (IE6, Windows Mobile and so on).

MS, why do you need first of all loose your reputation and then tries to return it back?

PS: Sad for MS, but I have to say that I'm already moved back to gmail from outlook.com as a mail provider after one year of usage.

This is getting embarrassing.  Again, I have missed congratulating one of my Contacts on her birthday!

@Moderators:  I was told several months ago that the support team has been notified.  How about asking them what  the status is?

@Support: When is this problem going to get fixed?

@Effected Users:  Keep this thread alive.  Keep asking the moderators for an update !!!!!!!

A definite way to lose existing calendar birthdays is to put a number of persons into a new group in the Windows phone (People). They also disappear from the phone’s People list which I think is unnecessary since you don't always want to address all the persons in the new group. If the persons in the new group have birthdays they disappear from the phone calendar, Outlook web calendar and PC Outlook (2007) calendar. The birthday entries in all three contact databases are still there. Refreshing does not help. This does not apply to the Favorites group, however.

Hi Harry,

This explains the trouble I had since October, finally. I never made the connection between creating a group of "best friends", deleting the group after a few weeks, and missing the birthdays months later!

It is however not the current behaviour on my account while trying to reproduce the error: People in the "best friends" and a test group now stay in the People list also, and no birthdays are lost. This was a short test using Windows Live Mail 2012, live.com in the browser, and a Lumia 720 Cyan PfD phone in Denmark. Sync'ing back and forth a few times, manually refresh the automatic birthday calendar, then delete the groups again - all is well.

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Hans