Outlook.com Calendar cannot be added to iCal

This is probably akin to tilting at windmills - i.e. an exercise in complete futility, but here goes nothing...

Question: What about an awareness raising campaign?

Reaction: "Eh? Say what now?"

Explanation: A petition, and/or a website, AND a stream of pissed off Mac owners who are Office365 paying customers pounding on Satya Nadella's Twitter account

He (Mr. Nadella) wants to change the culture at Microsoft? Excellent! Let's begin with him actively listening to the chorus of voices coming from revenue producers - THE CUSTOMERS and setting a team to work on something that annoys the hell out of a significant number of (and I repeat) paying customers

No disrespect to moderators of this or any other Microsoft forums, but y'all can only work with what you're given by Microsoft. I'm not shooting the messenger(s), let's get that out of the way right now. I'm aiming fair and square at an organization which is STILL NOT LISTENING.

Let's be clear about this:

Unless, or until, the organization gets the message loud and clear that there is widespread dissatisfaction, frustration and anger out there...with the concomitant risk of decidedly unfavorable coverage in the press and other forms of mass media, they will take the path of least resistance and do nothing.

Here is the message: 

"We Mac users who are paying for Office365 annually want the same Outlook calendaring functionality as your Windows-using Outlook customers have always had. We want to be able to access calendars everywhere; Google, Outlook.com (your OWN damn calendar for goodness sakes) and "other" webcals. We want access to be simple and uncomplicated AND standards-based. meaning: as simple adding an email account in Outlook 15.8. That.Simple. The current situation is unacceptable. We demand basic dynamicwebcal functionality. To avoid any ambiguity: Not static....Dynamic."

The "blurb" concerning Office365 calendaring is disingenuous to say the least.

I'm willing to put in the legwork to setup a petition, but its up to everyone to get the word out on Mr. Nadella's Twitter account. It IS within the bounds of possibility that he - personally - is unaware of this shortcoming. He's the CEO of an exceedingly large organization, thus a "detail" like this may have passed beneath his radar. We can correct that.

Can any Mac-using Office365 customer reading this, please respond in comments?

Always assuming this thread doesn't magically disappear from the forum of course

Thank you for your time.

I have yet to see any good answers on this one, and it seems the Microsoft really doesn't raise the bar much with platform compatibility.

Even Outlook for Mac seems more like an unloved step-child since it cannot even sync with outlook.com -- (Microsoft's own browser-based system) making the calendaring functions for any Microsoft solution essentially worthless on the Mac -- and that's for a paid solution! You could probably run Windows in a VM and run Outlook there -- but that seems kind of silly.

Microsoft proudly advertises on the front page of Office:mac (www.microsoft.com/mac/outlook): "email, calendars and contacts working together." Which is why I bought it. But it's an exaggeration. The only thing that really works together is email -- and there is a herd of email clients that will do that for free.

Looking back, I have seen posts about issues with Macs and calendars go on for months, not just on this thread, but many, and the frustration of the user base should be apparent to Microsoft. It just seems that instead of dealing with the issue, there is a lot of buck passing. To borrow a phrase from Scrum, there is a lot of technical debt that needs to be paid back.

I will write this, the support for those who subscribe to Office 365 for Mac is pretty darn good. There is a phone number one can call and get stellar assistance (at least in my experience). But even those folks, as good as they are, can't do much about the calendaring functions. They say Microsoft is working on it. I hope they are.

I have yet to see any good answers on this one, and it seems the Microsoft really doesn't raise the bar much with platform compatibility.

Even Outlook for Mac seems more like an unloved step-child since it cannot even sync with outlook.com -- (Microsoft's own browser-based system) making the calendaring functions for any Microsoft solution essentially worthless on the Mac -- and that's for a paid solution! You could probably run Windows in a VM and run Outlook there -- but that seems kind of silly.

Microsoft proudly advertises on the front page of Office:mac (www.microsoft.com/mac/outlook): "email, calendars and contacts working together." Which is why I bought it. But it's an exaggeration. The only thing that really works together is email -- and there is a herd of email clients that will do that for free.

Looking back, I have seen posts about issues with Macs and calendars go on for months, not just on this thread, but many, and the frustration of the user base should be apparent to Microsoft. It just seems that instead of dealing with the issue, there is a lot of buck passing. To borrow a phrase from Scrum, there is a lot of technical debt that needs to be paid back.

I will write this, the support for those who subscribe to Office 365 for Mac is pretty darn good. There is a phone number one can call and get stellar assistance (at least in my experience). But even those folks, as good as they are, can't do much about the calendaring functions. They say Microsoft is working on it. I hope they are.

Same here, really surprised by stupid Microsoft support... should go to hell.

According to Microsoft, Active Sync is designed for mobile devices. EWS is for desktop solutions like OS X.  Please refer to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn144954(v=exchg.140).aspx

I quote: 

"The Exchange ActiveSync protocol is designed for direct mobile device sync with Exchange, including lightweight clients, such as the Windows 8 Mail and Calendar application, that can be used in mobile scenarios. Exchange ActiveSync is optimized for low-bandwidth applications, such as messaging applications that run on mobile devices. Enhancements to the Exchange ActiveSync protocol primarily support stability and reliability for mobile device scenarios.

The EWS protocol provides rich functionality that enables you to add features similar to those in Outlook to your desktop applications. EWS enables efficient and well-managed server-to-server communications. Investments in EWS functionality continue to enable rich and comprehensive interactions with Exchange."

Last time I checked, EWS is a Microsoft product.  So if Outlook.com wants to implement EWS it wouldn't take much effort.  It's really about whether Outlook.com wants to appeal to desktop clients.

Instead of getting **** off, why don't you do a few simple Google searches?

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook\_com/forum/ocalendar-oaddtask/how-do-you-sync-microsoft-outlook-web-appss/5e7691e3-ab29-4734-9af9-10cac3f807f1

You have to remember that the people responding to these issues sometimes do not speak English as a first language, are using a guide (hmm...keywords are...), and probably do not own Macs. Apple support is just as bad.

Turns out the issue is on the Beloved, faultless, Apple OS X. APPLE doesn't support the protocol. So contact APPLE.

I quote:

"Mac uses Exchange Web Services to connect to Exchange. iPhone/iPad uses Exchange ActiveSync to connect to Exchange. Hotmail/Outlook only supports Exchange ActiveSync."

So go on the Apple support forums and ask them when OSX will support Exchange ActiveSync.

Sorry about my tone. I have experienced absolutely boneheaded support in these forums. My problem is with Mac users that tend to have the opinion that Apple has done everything in their power to support everything, so the onus is always on the Other Guy to fix the problems, but that simply isn't true.