I have used my Galaxy S3 successfully with my company's exchange server since the S3 was released, but sometime in February I started noticing that new contacts did not show up on my phone, and changes to existing contacts did not sync. Manually syncing the device claims to have worked successfully, but the data does not sync. Oddly, adding a new contact to the phone does sync back to the Exchange server.
In searching this appears to be a very common problem, many Exchange versions, many Android OS versions and iOS, many different phones. The only answer I've seen that may work is when a MS agent says "Our Specialists have determined the cause of your problem and have made an adjustment to your account..." Many times those are answered with "It didn't help", but other times the thread ends, so it may have helped. What account are they adjusting and what adjustment is being made?
I tried removing the Exchange account from my device, and deleting the reference to that device from the Exchange server, and then re-adding the account. As before, email and calendar work, but contacts do not sync. Since removing the account removed the existing contacts, I now have no contacts on my phone unless I create them there. I've seen posts from people who have done factory resets and not solved this problem, so I am confident the answer does not lie in the device.
Near as I can tell, something hidden on the phone or stored on the Exchange server or in conjunction with my Windows Live account decides which items have been sync'd and which changes are pending, and that mechanism gets confused. I need to find out what this mechanism is, and how I can get it to forget this device and start fresh.