Recommendation to sync Outlook.com Contacts & Calendars for newbie.

First a little background .....

I'm a recent transplant from the Windows world to the Mac world. In fact, over the weekend I purchased a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad. I previously had a Windows Laptop (still do for work) and Windows Surface Tablet and a Lumia 1520 Windows Phone. As you can imagine it's a pretty steep learning curve, especially since I've been on the Windows Platform since the mid 90's. I consider myself a pretty technically savvy individual so even though there's a lot to learn, a lot of it is just simple common sense.

At any rate, I've had a Hotmail account since it's inception, before it was purchased by Microsoft. I've stayed with Hotmail all this time and it has now transitioned to Outlook.com. End result is still the same. As you can imagine, I've got years of email that I want to keep, not to mention all my contacts and calendar appointments both past and future.

When I configured both my iPhone and iPad, Email, Contacts and Calendar Appointments all synced without any problems. I was very happy about that. On my Mac however that's a completely different story. Only the email syncs, not the contacts or the calendar events. The reason that seems to be floating around is that Outlook.com does not support either the CalDAV or CardDAV protocols, necessary to sync Appointments and Contacts. Not sure I understand the limitation since the iPhone and iPad don't have any issues; so why can't the Calendar and Contacts application on my Mac sync with Outlook.com???? I personally think its more of a Microsoft/Apple thing as it's always been. But enough about that, I'm not here to debate the merits of one over another. They both have their advantages and disadvantages and let's just leave it at that.

Onto my question. How can I get my Calendar Appointments and Contacts to sync with my Mac? Is there a way for me to sync my Calendar and Contacts from my iPhone/iPad to iCloud and then sync that back down to my Mac? Is that the preferred approach?

Looking forward to a respond and a resolution.

Thanks a bunch.

--- Val