Sync outlook.com calendar with Lightning in Thunderbird

Hi JeffRusk,

first of all: I think we all hear you but MS doesn't seem to hear us. In today's TechWorld it just must be clear that the chances of someone having a Windows Phone while having a Mac at home and a Windows PC at work are not that slim. Still no one agrees on any standard and just keeps doing their own stuff.

But the initial question for this thread was how to get the Outlook.com calendar into Thunderbird's Lightning add-on.

I'm not quite sure that's what you're trying to figure out here.

However I hear you: I used Outlook 2010 with shared calendars.

So maybe I can give you some more insight.

First of all: saving an ics-File and importing it is NEVER any solution when you're trying to share calendars that you want to sync.

The ics file is just one file that contains all your calendar entries from the moment you created that file. The file only updates when you manually create a new file and import it again.

So the way to go is definitely the "link" option. This way your program or interface connects automatically to the file on the Outlook servers were the file is kept up to date.

As I've written before: out of 3 attempts, 2 worked when I pasted the link from the "Get a link" page on Outlook.com and substituted the webcals-prefix with https. The second time I faced the same problem as you: for no reason it just wouldn't work until my Thunderbird erased all account information and I tried again.

And still, there's always the issue of not being able to write data to the calendar if it's shared. It's always read-only.

But when you're using Outlook 2010 or 2013 there shouldn't be any problem with viewing and modifying your own Outlook.com calendar. In 2010 you must download the Hotmail Connector from

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/microsoft-office-outlook-hotmail-connector-overview-HA010222518.aspx

From what you're writing I assume you use a not synchronized, offline, profile-based Outlook 2010 calendar. You should then definitely switch to using the Outlook.com one in Outlook 2010 with the above mentioned tool since from what you write MS seems to have canceled the feature that would allow you to share internal calendars (publish option).

The connector tool adds full Hotmail/Outlook.com support to Outlook 2010. I just upgraded my Outlook to 2013 so I'm not sure about specifics but in my opinion full support is included in 2013 without the need for the addon.

As for your colleagues I'm sorry but I have no other idea than trying that ics-LINK thing.

Good luck to you..

Andy