Looking for someone to clearly outline the Best Practices around using Categories in Outlook 2013 that relate for those of us with Outlook.com accounts.

I have over 400 contacts and before, used Outlook 2010 categories to sort them as Friends, Family, Hobbies, Religious, Work, Restaurants, School, Scouting, and many others. I get that they're all wiped clean now after migrating to Office Home 365 but before I recreate all the categories from scratch, I'd like to know how I could sync this "filing system" of mine with Outlook.com? Doesn't seem to be any way to separate contacts except for Favorites?

I've tried to keep it simple and don't merge any Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social network contacts.

Do the Outlook 2013 and Outlook.com teams work together? What's the synergy between the two?

ENV

In general, Outlook 2013 connects outlook.com through Exchange ActiveSync protocal and it should sync all categories.  However, EAS supports synching assigned Categories, but the category color is not synchronized. That means assigned existing categories do not show color.

Fortunately, thanks for the eq07's sharing solution, we can resolved the issue using a 3rd party tool. 

"Import and Export Category List" tool from Outlook Freeware (http://www.outlookfreeware.com/en/products/all/OutlookCategoryImport/). The software is split into two apps, a mandatory runtime app and secondary import and export tool.

You can find the detail steps from his thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/ba3c5e3a-35cf-418e-9eb9-99d8f9c4b477/help-custom-color-categories-suddenly-gone-in-outlook-2013-only-6-default-categories-showing

Thanks.

Tony Chen
TechNet Community Support

Thanks for the reply...although not "quite" the answer I was hoping for.

i.e. Why do two products from Microsoft named "Outlook" not have the same basic functionality? - Why can't I assign specific categories (regardless of color) to all my Outlook 2013 contacts such as "Family", "Friends", "Restaurants", "Kids", "Auto", "Medical", etc. and reference these same categories when on some remote PC using only the web and Outlook.com?

If I had my kids' doctors categorized as "Medical" in Outlook 2013, and then when away on vacation need to log into a public browser and find "Medical" contacts in Outlook.com - this is not possible, correct?