Syncing contacts between Exchange and iCloud in Mac — suggestions requested

I had posted earlier about an issue I am experiencing with the Mail app on Mac no longer connecting to my Exchange account. There was some question as to whether this has to do with Mac Mail using EWS to connect to Exchange and the planned deprecation of EWS as a connectivity mechanism to exchange. In responses some folks indicted that this started working for them again, but in my case it is still broken and I have resorted to using Outlook on my Mac for my mail, contacts and calendar.

This workaround is meeting my needs for the most part. Where I am missing out on is integration with the Mac Calendar and Message apps. I can’t see a combined calendar view that shows all entries, including those in Exchange, unless in Outlook. Neither are phone numbers resolving to names in the Message apps. One way to deal with contacts is to copy all my Exchange contacts into iCloud, and sync iCloud contacts to my Mac. But then changes made in Exchange have to be manually duplicated in iCloud and vice versa. I can live without Calendar integration in the Calendar app, but contacts in the app are harder to live without.

Can anyone suggest a workaround?

TIA