We have been struggling with contacts via ios at our company since the outlook app came to be. While we like the functionality of the app itself, the continued issue with contacts has created a spider web of problems for many of our users. We have found the best recommendation is to only utilize icloud to manage contacts on a device. Recently in making this switch, I felt I finally had clean contacts. No contacts in People on Outlook (other than access to corporate directory), only contacts on my phone. Started doing some testing to understand how to solve this easier. Our company utilizes 365.
Outlook App: Turned it on to sync. My 1 Outlook People contact showed up within IOS contacts. Said I couldn't edit on my iphone (no problem). I turned it off, and said to remove it. It removed it from IOS Contacts.
Exchange: Thought I would try the old exchange option. I wanted to test exchange to see if I could turn on and update on iphone and it would sync to outlook. Given I only had one outlook contact (outlook desktop People), I attempted to add a test contact. Added it on the phone, and it showed up in the IOS group "suggested contacts" under exchange group. Did not show up in outlook on my computer in people. So I turned it off. When I did, it asked if I wanted to delete exchange contacts from my iphone. I said yes. When I did, many of contacts were deleted from icloud? Somewhere these contacts were flagged as "exchange" contacts? Yet, I'm not sure where to even see exchange contacts anymore since we are on O365. Where do contacts on the ios app carry this exchange flag?
Any help would be appreciated as we continue to navigate how to best help our users manage their contacts.
Microsoft