Many people use multiple devices, want to share contact/calendar data among those devices but only have POP3 and/or IMAP email accounts neither of which synchronize contact/calendar data.
A simple and free solution to that dilemma is to create a free Outlook.com account used solely for the purpose of maintaining contact/calendar data.
The process to accomplish this is to add the Outlook.com account to each device involved. In Outlook (desktop), after the Outlook.com has been added to Outlook, the data file for the account should be set as the default data file. The purpose for this is that the default data file contains the default contact/calendar folders.
The next step would be to copy/move the contact/calendar data contained in PST and/or IMAP contact folders to the corresponding Outlook.com folders. In the case of contact/calendar data involving IMAP accounts, these folders would have the words “This Computer Only” in the folder descriptions when configured in OL’2013/’2016. In previous versions of Outlook, IMAP contact/calendar data would be contained in a PST file set as the default data file for the profile.
To copy contact items from one folder to another perform the following steps
- open the contact folder
- press CTRL+A to select all items in the folder
- right-click –> select <Move> then select either <Other Folder> or <Copy to folder>
*** recommend choosing <Copy to folder> in the event something goes sideways. This way the source items will not be automatically deleted as part of the process which would be the case when selecting <Other Folder>
To copy calendar items, set the calendar folder to use a “list” view and then rinse and repeat the steps described above for the contact folder.
If there are a lot of items contained in any of the folders, strongly recommend that Outlook is set to “Work Offline” so that the sync’ing process doesn’t start before the copy process completes. Once all data has been copied, restore Outlook back to online mode and perform a manual send/receive on the Outlook.com to synchronize with the server.