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Steve EndowFlag for United States of America

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RELIABLE Family Calendar solution for Exchange/Outlook + iPhones

This probably sounds trivial, but I have wasted so many hours on this that it's crazy. It's harder than it sounds.

Situation:  I use hosted Exchange 2013 with Outlook 2016, and I use an iPhone.  I schedule everything in my Outlook calendar for business and personal appointments, and absolutely need both my Outlook and iPhone calendars to be reliable and stay in sync.  My wife uses an iPhone with Yahoo Mail, but does not use any online calendar services.  After months of effort, I have finally got her to enter family appointments on her phone in a Family calendar.  But after trying several different calendar services that work with Outlook and iPhone, none have been reliable, and eventually the sync with my Outlook stops working.

Goal:  I need a reliable Family calendar that will work with my Outlook, my iPhone, and my wife's iPhone.  

The issue seems to be that non-Exchange calendar integrations with Outlook aren't reliable.  

I have tried Google Calendar with a third party app to sync to Outlook, but it was unreliable and the sync to/from Outlook would eventually break.  I have tried iCloud, but the iCloud integration with Outlook is completely unreliable--it will stop working and require a sign out / sign in or a complete reinstall of iCloud and sometimes Office as well.  Outlook has also disabled the iCloud add-in because it causes Outlook to crash or load slowly.  I think I also tried using Yahoo Calendar, but gave up on that as well.

I would like to try and avoid having to setup an Exchange account for my wife just so that I can have a shared family calendar in Outlook.  But if I can't find any third party calendar service that will reliably sync, then that might be my only remaining option.

Looking for suggestions.
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Avatar of Lance Hietpas
Lance Hietpas
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Thanks Lance, good idea.  I completely forgot about Outlook.com.  Presumably that should be more reliable than a non-MS service that requires an integration with Outlook.  I already had an Outlook.com account, so I have added it to Outlook on my desktop and my iPhone and copied all of the appointments over.  I'll get it setup on my wife's iPhone and will see how it goes.

At worst, if it stops syncing in Outlook on my desktop, it's easy enough to delete the account and recreate it, and won't have to deal with a separate integration to Outlook.

I'll see how it goes.
Update: While the Outlook.com does appear to be working okay, it seems to be slower than my Exchange account.  Adding or editing Outlook.com appointments in Outlook takes 1-2 seconds, where Outlook will pause before it will respond.  But I've switched over the family calendar to Outlook.com and it appears to be working well.  Definitely simpler than relying on an Outlook AddIn or external Outlook integration.

Thanks!