Outlook.com Calendar birthdays sync issue

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 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

Hello lame,

Thank you for posting back.

Let me assist you on this matter and rest assured that I will endeavor to assist you as best as I can and hopefully we can get this issue fixed for you.

Please try to delete the Birthday Calendar on your Outlook.com Calendar then re-add it again and see if those birthdays saved on your People page will automatically reflect on Outlook.com Calendar. You may follow the steps below on how to delete your Birthday Calendar.

1. Sign-in to your Outlook.com Calendar.
2. Click the gear icon, then select Options.
3. From the Calendar lists, select the Birthday calendar.
4. Click the Delete button from the toolbars, then Delete again for the confirmation.

Once the Birthday Calendar has already been deleted, you'll need to add a new Birthday Calendar. Kindly follow the steps below on how to do this.

1. Click the drop down menu beside the New button, then select Birthday Calendar.
2. Type in your preferred Calendar name, then click the Save button.

Just let us know for any results.

Hi Dhenz,

I am afraid I didn't explain clarly in my previous post that I did delete the Birthday Calendar in Outlook.com and then re-add it again several times (following the procedure you suggested), without the problem being solved (i.e. the missing birthdays would still be missing in the newly added Birthday Calendar.)

For doubt's sake I did all the procedure again, and the result was the same: this is not the solution.

As m@rk, other users here and myself should have made clear by now, this problem can't be solved by an already existing procedure performed by the users (and it's definitely not a user mistake). In fact, it should be solved by the Outlook programmers. I have suggested some kind of solution in my previous post, but surely there are better ones that you can think of.

Thanks for your post anyway!

Francesco

Hello Francesco,

I have sent you a private message. Please sign in to this thread to see it.

Thanks,