Sync outlook.com calendar with Lightning in Thunderbird

Anonymous

Hi.

I am looking to sync the calendar in Outlook.com with that available in Lightning, a calendar add-on available for Thunderbird.

Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance.

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Anonymous

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

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55 additional answers

Anonymous

2014-04-10T08:16:18+00:00

Here's what I did to get read-only access to my calendar data:

On outlook.com open your calendar and click share in the upper menu, then select your calendar.

Now, I'm not sure if you first need to click on "Get a link". It says in my account that I've already created all possible types of links, but I can't recall if this is a prerequisite.

Anyway, under "Permisssions" there should be a link-symbol titled "Links to event details". Click that.

Copy the link from below "Import into other calendar applications (ICS)".

Now go to Thunderbird's menu and hit "New -> Calendar" under "File".

Select "On the network" and in the next menu choose "iCalendar".

Paste the address from outlook.com into the field below.

Now substitute the first part of the link address: "webcals" must become "https"!

On the next screen I disabled notifications. As mentioned at the beginning, outlook only allows for read-only access. In my experience confirming alerts is kind of like editing an event, so having notifications enabled caused my TB to crash.

Once you're done TB should automatically try to sync and within a few seconds your entries should pop up. If they don't after some time the configuration's wrong. There usually is no error message if something's wrong so you can just wait and see.

However, even on the same machine I had differing success with this procedure.

I remember that this used to work after reading it somewhere. Then last year I had to setup TB again and all of a sudden I couldn't get it to work anymore. Just today my TB was ruined again, so I configured it once again and in the process found that now it seems to be working again.

Good luck everybody!
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Anonymous

2014-01-07T09:58:48+00:00

As already said, the ics link method works very will but the calendar is read only in lightning.

I have found this page. It claims they can communicate with Outlook's exchange server. Please try it and inform if it succeeds or not.
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Anonymous

2013-11-25T19:44:54+00:00

Well unfortunately, I found that if you subscribe to a Google calendar on Outlook.com, if you edit the Google Calendar, it can take forever (it never updated after two hours and I found posts of it taking days.) So I waived the white flagged and moved all my calendaring to Outlook.com. You win Microsoft but that's just because you aren't getting any of my money for using Outlook.com. So now I will use the web interface for all my calendar management. I run Android and the Calendar app works great with Outlook.com.
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Anonymous

2013-11-25T19:34:50+00:00

This comment made my day. Don't be a moderator if you can't wake up. LOL.
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