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Outlook Mobile (iPad) and Save Contacts being turned back on again (second device) This will happen to attempt to ensure no duplicates across multiple devices. If you later on try to enabled Save Contacts on a second Outlook Mobile device you will get told that sync is already happening on a different device and that to sync from the current device will require contact deletion and sync to start. I found this was instant though (but I only have a few intentional contacts and duplicates).
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This will remove the duplicates but it might take 24 hours for Microsoft to reconcile this duplicate state for you. You need to turn off Save Contacts on all but one device. If you have multiple iOS devices and you are signed into each of them with the same Outlook Mobile account AND you enable Save Contacts on more than one device, then you will get duplicates. Your contacts now appear in iCloud (again, quite quickly but I guess this depends upon the number of them).Settings > Contacts > Accounts > iCloud > iCloud (yes, twice) > turn ON Contacts > Merge (there is nothing to merge if you deleted them all in #9 above).Initial sync will only happen when the Outlook app is running and in the foreground, so you may need to plug your device into the power and leave Outlook as the active app for the duration of time required to sync all your contacts once.Contacts app should list these (more will take longer, but they should start to sync shortly).Open Outlook Mobile and Settings > for each Email Account > Save Contacts to On > Save to my iPhone.Then its time to restore the contacts to the phone. So it is easy to tidy up contacts from here whereas on the phone it is delete one by one!
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You can select more than one here at a time. Delete them all (or at least those in Exchange).If there are still contacts visible then in the Outlook app choose Settings > Help & Feedback > Delete All Saved Contacts in order to remove any lingering duplicates. Open Contacts app on phone – it should be empty.Settings > Contacts > Accounts > other accounts > repeat above to delete.Device Settings > Contacts > Accounts > iCloud > iCloud (yes, twice) > turn off Contacts > Delete from my iPhone.Outlook Mobile > Settings > for each Email Account > Save Contacts – Turn Off > Delete from my iPhone.Different tenants? Maybe try different iCloud accounts or be prepared for duplicates (see last paragraph for more info on this). This is probably a unique scenario to a consultant, but do ensure that each iOS device a user has under the same iCloud account is synced to the same tenant. Each are signed into with the same Apple iCloud account, but each at any time could be synced to different tenants.
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