Outlook/exchange calendar not syncing with iOS8

Which version of iOS are you currently on?

I have got the same problem and I am on iOS 8.2 with an iphone 4S

The Outlook calendar syncing has stopped working (I am not using iCloud).

Unfortunately whatever they have done with 8.2 seems to have made the situation worse for me and not better.

Does Apple accept there is still a problem ?

I had same issue.

I am not sure where I read this - (maybe in some other thread). But checking "All Events" in my "Settings"->"Mail, Contacts, Calender" -> "Sync" (fourth item up from all the way bottom).

This fixed it - now a new appointment I enter in my iPhone shows up on my outlook.com and then also on my desktop outlook.

Hope this helps someone at least!

BTW, if this indeed was the cause - it shows clearly that it is Apple's fault. Apart from designing pretty devices and cute interface - their back-end engineering must be truly bad to have such an bug not being fixed after such a long time.

That didn't work for me. Appointments in iPhone don't go to my Outlook calendar. Also, since ios 8 install, I don't get email notifications unless I open the email box. Then I could have 10 that come in. If this is really a "Microsoft problem", then it looks like my next phone may well be a Windows phone, since all of the communication software I have to use for work is Microsoft. It used to work fine, but iOS 7 started messing it up and iOS8 has made it totally unreliable. Since I need it for work, no matter how pretty or trendy or edgy the iPhone might be, if I can't use it for work, it's a $500 brick in my pocket. Are you listening Apple? Some of us do more than read Facebook, take pictures and watch movies on our phones....some of us try to use them as an extension of our Office. If your stuff won't work with Outlook (which hasn't changed during this problem period), then I'll be a little less trendy and get a phone that DOES work.

I've tried every solution listed and none work more than a day or two (basically until I start changing things). Again today, had I not known that I had an appointment and just relied on my iPhone calendar, I would have missed 2 meetings. It's a problem, and not a small one.

While I did manage to get the Outlook sync through outlook.com working with above mentioned "All Events" trick - I did not like the sync part on the Desktop side (You had to do a "send/receive" to get appointments synced with outlook.com).

So in the end - I ended up going with a completely different solution through google calender:

1) Install "GO Contact Sync Mode" (it is a free public domain tool which syncs google calenders with outlook).

2) Set up iphone to use google calender.

Now the syncing is SMOOTH as ever. You can change sync frequency in GO Contact Sync Mode tool to any amount (I have currently set it to 15 minutes) and it will sync automatically in the back-ground.

Just to explain the complete setup - Outlook calender is now synced with google calender (on google.com). And iPhone calender is also synced with same google calender. Any changes in Outlook are reflected on your phone (via google calender) in about 15 minutes and vice versa (you can change 15 minutes to any duration you want).

Just in case this helps someone else. Also if you cannot get outlook.com based sync working anyway - than this maybe worth it.

Thanks....my company uses Outlook Exchange on the server. I was able to get my calendar information up to google calendars, but adding an appointment on the Outlook exchange calendar doesn't get moved into google and consequently won't make it to my phone unless I manually upload my Outlook to google calendar. I suppose I could try to convince the exchange administrator to tweak Outlook so it can work with Google... So basically my iphone is worthless as a work tool. Designed for social media, watching videos, and a camera. Yeah..it can make calls. But when you don't get alerts of e-mail until you actually open the mailbox, and when you can't sync your meetings with the calendar you use for work, the the iPhone is pretty much a $500 toy.

Do the developers at Apple not have a test system using Outlook Exchange in order to test if their phones work? iOS 8.2 pretty much ruined my phone. And there apparently isn't a way to unistall and go back to a version that worked. I used to be an Apple fan, but the last 2 OS upgrades are making Android and even WINDOWS phones look like a better deal.

Thanks....my company uses Outlook Exchange on the server.

I found a workaround - I downloaded the Microsoft Outlook App from the app store and configured it. This works...I get notifications when e-mail arrives and my calendar syncs both ways. The only problem is - my company uses Airwatch (management tool) that allows them to delete company data if the phone is lost. This Outlook App goes around that. I'm afraid to tell my IT group about this because if they shut it down, I'm back to depending on the settings on the iPhone and that means - I'm dead in the water.

Regarding the Outlook App on the App Store, I don't think it passes on the requirement that you have to set a pin on your phone either. I could be mistaken on this item though. Unless the app has been updated to address this, contacts were a pain to navigate through, so I just deleted the app and haven't used it in a while now.

So today I tried applying two temporary (because I don't know how long they will last) fixes to two users at my work. The first user had an iphone 5 on 8.2 and his calendar failed to sync. First I tried changing the date range of how far back his calendar would sync. This didn't appear to trigger a sync (read: no swirl in his status bar when I went into his calendar). We waited a couple minutes but nothing happened.

After that I tried the process of removing/re-entering his exchange account password. Success! This triggered a sync and his calendar started to re-populate with the meetings that he had entered into his Outlook calendar on his PC.

I applied the password temp. fix to another user confirmed that appointments were appearing on his phone calendar and his Outlook calendar that were missing from each location. Unfortunately I neglected to check which version of iOS he was on.

Thank you to the users who have posted this. It's been successful today. Now to see how long it takes to break again.

Here's a solution that works for me -- may or may not be good for others obviously. If you can, use the icloud calendar and contacts and install Apple's icloud for windows to sync it all up with whatever version of Outlook you are running on a PC. Probably not a solution for those using outlook 20xx on larger company systems/networks but I'm just looking for a home solution to link my IOS devices and my PC running Outlook 2013. Have used EAS for outlook.com e-mail and contacts for a while on my i-devices and it works great, syncing across them all. Currently have iphone 6 and ipad air on IOS 8.2. Home set-up is a Dell Win7 laptop that is only a year old and fully up to date. I needed to set up a new personal calendar and first tried activating the outlook.com calendar as the obvious solution. Immediately began having random breaks in the sync per this thread. Despite the release notes, 8.2 appears not to have fully addressed this problem. Calendar entries initiated on Outlook 2013 appeared to make it to the outlook.com server every time, but the connections to/from the IOS devices would fail randomly. Couldn't live with that obviously. After reading this and other posts, I didn't feel like trying all the "tricks" and/or re-loading my accounts on the IOS devices as I'm pretty sure this random issue will re-appear. I suffered through a couple years of the initial random failings of IOS devices using EAS to connect to my work e-mail and all of the supposed fixes worked until they didn't.

So -- I activated my icloud calendar/contacts and am using the icloud for windows application to connect to Outlook 2013. Initial tests work flawlessly. The i-devices sync perfectly and instantaneously, which is what I would expect. The calendar/contacts on icloud.com also sync up immediately. I'm only a few hours into testing, but the connection to Outlook 2013 on my PC is spot on as well. I do worry that this connection will fail from time to time -- apple software trying to control a Microsoft product which is bound to have problems -- but of all my devices and connections, the PC is the one I rely on the least.

One caution -- at install the icloud outlook add-in appears to blow away the old outlook.com calendar loaded in outlook 2013 and merge it with the newly linked icloud calendar so if you have been using an outlook.com calendar and have lots of stuff in there I would make sure you have a way to go back to the way it was if the install goes poorly. No idea what would happen at install if you have multiple calendars set up in Outlook 2013..... Probably wise to do an Outlook back up of some kind or plan for a system restore in case it goes wrong. I'm no expert on all that, but the apple software takes hold when you set it up, and I doubt there's an easy way to backtrack. There are some notes in the apple KB on this -- Get help using iCloud Calendar - Apple Support. Since I had two empty calendars to begin with it wasn't an issue.

I've read through 5 pages of comments on this feed and several other tech sites. It seems like this is an issue that Apple needs to fix with it's operating system. Microsoft hasn't addressed it either with a Rollup or Patch for Exchange. What a shame. Such an important functionality for just about EVERYONE that uses Exchange. I'm telling my clients that this is a known issue with Apple/Microsoft and unsyncing and resyncing the calendar will temporarily solve the issue until they address it permanently.

I can't figure out how to actually remove the password other than going into settings and erasing, but that doesn't trigger a sync.

I am needing to remove and readd the accounts several times a week now. Grrr.

Has anyone tried the Mail+ app as a substitute?

Try going into the settings and account that is affected, wipe out the password (anything you type in the password field will wipe out what's currently there) and re-enter the password. After entering the password and tap Done. You should see check marks next to each item if entered correctly.

After doing that, tap on the calendar app. If this temporary fix works for you, you should see the swirling circle just to the right of your carrier name/Wi-Fi icon in the status bar of your phone. If you see the swirl, that should be an indicator that your phone is performing a sync/update.

When I applied this fix to a couple of users at my work it took roughly a minute before missing entries on their iOS calendar started reappearing. After that we were able to successfully enter a calendar item on their iPhone calendar and have it appear on their Outlook calendar.

It's worth noting that I haven't received any reports of it failing again after applying the fix. So I'm considering it temporary, at best, at this time.

No dice for me, but thank you for walking me through it.

I'm shopping for a different program to use instead of calendar now. Bah!