iCloud contact labels change when synchronizing with outlook
I have seen prior posts on this, but I am unable to post an update because they are old. This is a resolution. Others may have figured this out, but I was unable to find anything and ended up stumbling across this with a lot of debugging
The issue is when you save contacts from Outlook to your local iOS device using the Outlook functionality of save contacts, it pushes them across correctly initially and then a few hours later all of the labels for different phone numbers change from work, mobile, etc. to generic phone. This had been happening for a while, and I couldn’t figure it out.
Long and short, here is the solution. Outlook will sync it across correctly via the save contacts functionality, but if you also have iCloud as an account in Outlook, Outlook syncs back down contacts as well as calendars and email and when it does this it clobbers the phone labels. I was able to see this happen by turning various things on and off and isolating things.
My solution, which is working so far, was to simply NOT connect my iCloud account to Outlook. Outlook still will save contacts locally and then once they are in your contacts on your phone that syncs to iCloud and therefore your other devices.
With this solution, I unfortunately lost the ability to see all of my calendars at once. Since my outlook is secure I can only see outlook calendars within outlook so an inability to also pull in iCloud calendars makes this functionality impossible from my view. There is no way, that I could find, to have iCloud connected to Outlook and not have it synchronizing contacts as well. I would have preferred a way to shut off contacts and have it only synchronize calendars. For me I don’t even want to see iCloud mail in Outlook. Just iCloud calendars, but that does not appear to be possible. If anyone is aware of a solution for that, please message back.
I hope this solution helps some folks because from all my searching I couldn’t find one posted resolution.
