People/contacts/Outlook.com question

[Wayne Orwig]

Since moving to Windows 8 and my Surface, I have an odd issue.

Basically, I tried to switch my Email, Calendar and Contacts to Outlook.com. I have a laptop running Office 2007, a Surface Pro, and an Android phone.

My email and calendar I like to share with all devices. So I set all of them to get email and the calendar from Outlook.com. All is well.

But contacts (people), are another matter. My laptop with Outlook 2007 will not sync the contacts to Outlook.com. There is an addon called the Hotmail connector for Outlook 2007, but it does NOT sync TO Outlook.com. It will sync FROM Outlook.com to Outlook 2007. And Outlook.com does not support some of the Contacts fields, such as the contact photo.

So, I keep my contacts on Google. I have a program the keeps my laptop Outlook 2007 in sync with Google contatcs. My Android phone of course syncs with Google. And on Outlook.com, I have it 'synced' with Google so they show up in my Windows 8 People app. But that is a ONE WAY sync. I can't create or edit a contact in Windows 8, and have that get to my other devices.
Am I missing something obvious? This is pretty goofy. I would prefer using Outlook.com for everything, but the support is not there for Outlook 2007 and I would lose some contact info if I did that. If I had everything on a personal exchange server, it would work.
What a pain.

 

[daniielrp]

You seem to be in old Outlook will not synch with Outlook/Hotmail/Live situation, which I always felt was pretty stupid.

My best advised would be t ditch Outlook 2007 and get Outlook 2013 instead, as this has native ActiveSync support so will work perfectly with your Outlook.com for mail, contacts, calendars etc. Your Android phone likewise has ActiveSync support so will also work superbly with this.

 

[Wayne Orwig]

You seem to be in old Outlook will not synch with Outlook/Hotmail/Live situation, which I always felt was pretty stupid.

My best advised would be t ditch Outlook 2007 and get Outlook 2013 instead, as this has native ActiveSync support so will work perfectly with your Outlook.com for mail, contacts, calendars etc. Your Android phone likewise has ActiveSync support so will also work superbly with this.

Yes, it appears to be pretty stupid of them to not provide a good way to sync contacts from 2007 to Outlook.com.

But I have two reasons to not upgrade to 2013. One is simply the cost. The other is that I don't believe all of the contact fields exist on Outlook.com. I'm sure that my contact photos will be lost. Maybe others.
As for the Android phone, it is amazingly flexible and will happily work with any service I set it to use. Which is why this inflexibility in Win 8 and Outlook 2007 is so annoying.