Today I hit the first real head exploding moment with the iPhone…contacts and contact management. Ugh. Let me set this up. I work with multiple O365 accounts and have hundreds of contacts in them. My home account has about 400 and one of my work ones has about 800. On my Windows Phone the native connection allowed me to save contacts and choose which cloud service that I was saving the contact to, or to save it locally. This seems to me to be a standard requirements of contact management.
Not so on the iPhone. When I first setup my iPhone, I immediately loaded Outlook and connected it to my O365 accounts and everything was great. Alas, I couldn’t get to my contacts (stupid user error, but more on that later. So, what I did was setup my account to not sync mail but to sync contacts
How I setup my account to sync Contacts
When you hit Advanced Setting you see this…
Alright! I am good to go. There is just one major problem. You cannot add contacts via Outlook for iOS. Nor can you select what account to sync them with if you edit them in the native Contacts App. I stopped syncing them via Outlook and went back to the native iOS sync and you still cannot choose what account you want them to be added to. That is a serious limitation. Microsoft says that they will be updating the Outlook for iOS app in the coming months, but Apple should have had this capability a very long time ago.