The WP7 Calendar

[sc:mobile-category ]Having used the WP7 calendar now for a while, one item that kind of jumped out at me was how it interacted with multiple accounts. Currently on my WP7 phone I have three accounts setup, My Exchange server, Windows Live and Facebook.

When I first set up these accounts I left the default names in place, so they were called Outlook, Windows Live  and Facebook.  However I didn’t like “Windows Live”, so I changed it to just “Live”.

I don’t actually use my Live account at all, it doesn’t even have a mailbox, it uses my Exchange account as the login id.  This works well as I really don’t want yet another mailbox to work with.  However there is no way in WP7 to disable Calendar and Contact sync with a Live account, once you have setup a Live account, you get sync’d with everything.

So having nothing in my Live calendar I went in to the WP7 calendar options and turned the Live calendar off.

One would expect that turning the calendar off would disable all functionality in the calendar app, but really it just turns off the display of calendar items.  Which I guess is ok, but seems a little counter intuitive.

Shortly after all of this, I created my first calendar item on the phone and this is where it got interesting.  When creating a new appointment, WP7 picks the first account with a calendar in alphabetical order, weather  it is turned on or off.  So in my case, since I’d renamed the Live account, I had to select my “Outlook” account each time I created a new appointment.

It was an easy “fix”, I just renamed the Live account back to Windows Live, but really there are three questions I have for Microsoft:

  1. Why can’t I disable calendar sync on my Windows Live account?
  2. Why doesn’t turning off a calendar disable all of its functionality?
  3. Why is there not way to set the default calendar to use for new items?

Perhaps on of the updates this year will answer one of these questions, but until then the workaround is pretty straight forward.

P.S. A fourth question might be why the default name for an Exchange account is Outlook, but that kind of answers itself as most people think of Outlook as their mail server, not Exchange, because that’s what they see on the client 🙁

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Greg

Greg is the head cat at JumbleCat, with over 20 years of experience in the computer field, he has done everything from programming to hardware solutions. You can contact Greg via the contact form on the main menu above.

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Greg

Greg is the head cat at JumbleCat, with over 20 years of experience in the computer field, he has done everything from programming to hardware solutions. You can contact Greg via the contact form on the main menu above.

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