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.

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.

@hn333 That is not a fix.  The error still exists.

Fact is: when 3rd party contacts (e.g. Facebook) are combined with People contacts the birthdays from People contacts are randomly lost.

You have not fixed this problem.  You have chosen to maintain your birthdays manually.

I fixed the problem by getting rid of the Birthday calendar all together and just saving my birthdays in my main outlook calendar.

I have seen many posts about people having problems with getting birthdays to sync between People and Calendar.  I'm having the same problem myself.  I added all my birthdays to Calendar and they showed up fine for a couple of days, then they all disappeared.  I discovered that they are all now showing up in People, but NOT in Calendar.

I see that you are telling folks you will reply to them privately, rather than acknowledging that this is an issue and posting some kind of a fix.  

So I'm posting my message and hoping you will contact me directly.  My email is ******@nmi.org and I would be happy to provide you with screen shots of my People and Calendar which are NOT synching properly.

Thanks.

Elise

We understand your concern with urgently resolving this issue with your birthday calendar and we apologize for not getting back to you sooner. However, we've checked your inquiry and determined that it's still under investigation by our Support Specialists. Rest assured that we are doing our best to fix this. We'll notify you on this thread as soon as updates about it have been provided.

Have a happy November, all together!

Unfortunately, still we're playing birthdays roulette. For this month, here's my birthdays calendar and screenshots of contacts with known birthdays, currently missing in the calendar:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/g1wmmwcslv1azag/AAC85qsohzm8MhWgVm4e2iSNa?dl=0

I permit to summarize again:

• Birthdays disappear and sometimes re-appear in calendar by random
• All types of contacts are affected**: standalone Outlook.com contacts, linked contacts, standalone Facebook/ Skype etc. contacts**
• Manual sync of birthdays calendar doesn't resolve
• Un- and relinking contacts as well as deleting and recreating the birthdays calendarmight result in more or less complete listing of birthdays on short-term -but it doesn't solve the service bug in general**: birthdays will randomly disappear and re-appear again**

This issue is reported since months! Might get assumed that just syncing a Birthdays calendar properlyshouldn't mean rocket science for a company like Microsoft ...

@Moderators: what does it take to make you just take this issue serious, reported and confirmed repeatedly?Wasting customers time by annoying them with senseless boilerplates again and again doesn't resolve the issue! What exactly is the state of investigation? Have you even reported this to Microsoft? Are they aware of this thread for instance?

@Microsoft - aren't yourselves using your offered services? Please realize: an inconsistent birthdays calendar service is worthless. Please analyze the birthday calendars' sync processes and finally fix the service!

Any kind of serious support is highly appreciated. We're all curious about findings and results. Since months...

Thanks.