Outlook.com Calendar birthdays sync issue

Mmmm, the only problem is that there isn't a Birthday calendar under Options.  So what do I do now?

thanks

gt

@amz1510

Here are the steps to refresh the calendar.  If no Birthday calendar is shown, then you haven't added one.

As many long-time participants of this post well know, some disappeared birthdays will not show even by deleting the entire calendar and re-adding it. In my experience, the refresh makes a missing birthday appear again very seldom (mainly recently added birthdays that have not synced yet between all services/devices you use).

I have been reporting an example for this kind of issues since months. If by accident (or because you realized you inserted a wrong date for a birthday), you delete a birthday (let’s say Tom Birthday) from the calendar, then you will never be able to add that birthday again from the People/Contacts (in Contacts, Tom will have his birthday, but it won’t show any more on the Birthday Calendar). I have tried several procedures, including editing contacts info (e.g. changing Tom Birth date), refreshing the Calendar, deleting and re-adding the Birthday Calendar. This is not smart, since the decision of deleting should be reversible. Your only option is to create a new Tom Contact and re-enter not only his birthday, but also all his contact info. Afterwards, delete the "old" Tom. And yes, repeat for all your affected contacts. Clearly, this is not smart.

My proposed solution for bugged Calendars is that they make the “delete Calendar” work as real RESET, without any hidden information kept; then, when subsequently re-adding the calendar, make the system do it from scratch, checking all your contacts and adding their Birtdays to the Calendar). All the Outlook contacts ought to be perfectly synced between contact and the Birthday Calendar! 

Then they can start to work on the Birthdays from other services.

I know they won’t make it for Christmas, but is it too much wishful thinking to imagine to get it done in the new year?

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.

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.

--

Hans