For various reasons I'm in team outlook.com rather than team gmail.com.

I sign into my Windows boxes with my Microsoft ID and all my email and contacts just magically work.

Well the writing is on the wall for Windows Phone, and I have a shiny new Android phone.

This presents a problem. I went through this challenge with my wife's phone and I thought I'd ask you fellow Geekzoners if there is a better way before I embark. What I have observed is:

Android is happy to read your outlook.com contacts via the outlook app, but if you add new ones on the phone they don't get added to the outlook.com people (and thus are not reflected in your Windows 'people' app either).

I initially configured my wife's outlook.com email address as a google ID, that sorted out the Play Store but I had no way to view what was happening to contacts added to the phone, or if phone backups were working or where they were even going.

To get around this I created a gmail.com account for her, just for the phone. This seems pretty ugly and I don't want to do it again.

Are there any graceful solutions to this problem?