Forum Discussion
Exchange Online shared calendars on mobile devices
Earlier this week we had a few users start to notice other users' meetings showing up on their calendars on the native iOS calendar app and the Outlook for iOS app. I experienced the issue as well. When I opened the Outlook app I could see 3 of my colleagues events on my calendar that I was not part of. I had recently looked at those calendars via Outlook on my PC. Today I noticed that someone else had posted about the issue on Twitter. The calendars are easy to remove and I am only aware of 1 instance where the calendars returned on the mobile device. Does anyone have any details about a change that Microsoft would be rolling out that would have caused this? Anyone else experience the issue?
Hi Mike,
This is part of the shared calendar improvements we are enabling & discussed during last year's Ignite conference that Vasil linked to. These improvements address a long-standing request from users to sync Office365 shared calendars to mobile phones (iOS UserVoice, Android UserVoice). We started slowly enabling this for users at the beginning of this year.
In the first iteration, newly accepted shared calendars would sync to mobile phone if the calendar was shared & accepted from Outlook on the web. In the next update, calendars could be shared from any Outlook client, and as long as the users accepted in Outlook on the web, the newly accepted shared calendar would sync to mobile.
However, it's possible to grant calendar permissions from Outlook on Windows or Mac without a sharing invitation being sent to the users. When we started releasing these improvements, many users pointed out that they "accept" shared calendars by opening the calendar in Outlook (rather than accepting a sharing invitation). So we implemented an experimental update that allowed a calendar to be accepted from Outlook on the web or Windows, using either the accept button or by opening the calendar.
This expermental update turned out to be the most noticeable difference for users like yourself. The feedback has mostly been that if I open a calendar for which I don't have direct permissions (e.g. viewing a calendar of someone in your organization with the default user permissions), then we shouldn't sync those calendars to mobile phones. However, users did want calendars to sync to mobile phones if they're opened a calendar for which they've been granted individual permissions.
To support that user feedback, we have temporarily disabled the "open calendar" update, and we're working on adding a check to determine if the user who is opening the calendar has individual permissions to the calendar. So, the current state is that only calendars accepted in Outlook on the web from a sharing invitation will sync to mobile. (However, soon Outlook on iOS and Android will also support accepting invites!)
This should hopefully explain why you see some of your colleagues' calendars on your mobile phone - if you opened a calendar in the past week or two, it was considered "accepting" the calendar and it started sync'ing to mobile phones. You can use Outlook on the web, iOS, or Android to delete the calendar, and at this point, the calendars won't re-appear even if you re-open them from Outlook.
Hope that helps explain the issue you noticed!
Mike, do you really feel that your original question was fully answered?
- Julia Foran
Microsoft
Hi Arnold,
- If you accept a new sharing invitation, the calendar will appear on all mobile apps.
- If you open a shared calendar, the calendar will NOT appear on mobile apps.
- Nothing changes with existing calendars -- if you opened a calendar previously that synced to mobile (before we disabled those changes), it will continue to syncing to mobile.
If you're seeing something else, please raise a support ticket for investigation.
Thanks,
Julia
The biggest concern is that nobody remembers opening up another calendar on their mobile device. Additionally in our case they are not shared calendars. They are other people's calendars. Often it is direct reports. What strange is that some cases, it looks like OK, this comes from the organization attributes in AD, the person with the extra calendars is listed as the manager in AD, other times that is not the case though. Now sometimes looks like well all of those additional calendars are people who have some mailbox permission or other to the person who is seeing the calendars mailbox in exchange, then in other cases that is not true either. So we do not have a concrete answer as to where did this come from and more importantly, how can we control it.
I did open up a support case. After days of troubleshooting I was literally redirected to this posting.
That would most likely be the new Calendar sharing model as detailed here: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2016/THR2017R
Julia Foran can give more details.
- Julia Foran
Hi Mike,
This is part of the shared calendar improvements we are enabling & discussed during last year's Ignite conference that Vasil linked to. These improvements address a long-standing request from users to sync Office365 shared calendars to mobile phones (iOS UserVoice, Android UserVoice). We started slowly enabling this for users at the beginning of this year.
In the first iteration, newly accepted shared calendars would sync to mobile phone if the calendar was shared & accepted from Outlook on the web. In the next update, calendars could be shared from any Outlook client, and as long as the users accepted in Outlook on the web, the newly accepted shared calendar would sync to mobile.
However, it's possible to grant calendar permissions from Outlook on Windows or Mac without a sharing invitation being sent to the users. When we started releasing these improvements, many users pointed out that they "accept" shared calendars by opening the calendar in Outlook (rather than accepting a sharing invitation). So we implemented an experimental update that allowed a calendar to be accepted from Outlook on the web or Windows, using either the accept button or by opening the calendar.
This expermental update turned out to be the most noticeable difference for users like yourself. The feedback has mostly been that if I open a calendar for which I don't have direct permissions (e.g. viewing a calendar of someone in your organization with the default user permissions), then we shouldn't sync those calendars to mobile phones. However, users did want calendars to sync to mobile phones if they're opened a calendar for which they've been granted individual permissions.
To support that user feedback, we have temporarily disabled the "open calendar" update, and we're working on adding a check to determine if the user who is opening the calendar has individual permissions to the calendar. So, the current state is that only calendars accepted in Outlook on the web from a sharing invitation will sync to mobile. (However, soon Outlook on iOS and Android will also support accepting invites!)
This should hopefully explain why you see some of your colleagues' calendars on your mobile phone - if you opened a calendar in the past week or two, it was considered "accepting" the calendar and it started sync'ing to mobile phones. You can use Outlook on the web, iOS, or Android to delete the calendar, and at this point, the calendars won't re-appear even if you re-open them from Outlook.
Hope that helps explain the issue you noticed!
Thank you Julia Foran for the quick and detailed response. I would like to be proactive with our internal support personnel when these new features are pushed to our tenant. Is there a reason this was not posted in our tenant admin message center?
Mike Tilsonthanks for the presentation, it was informative and it reminded me of a long standing issue: accounting for Travel time to meetings in other buildings, i.e., if we have to go to a meeting, we are not available and the calendar should reflect this time to others. Is any work being done to improve Outlooks ability to handle this?
It should be rather straight forward to provide the ability to add time before and after a meetings start and end time to account for attendees individual travel durations.
People have been asking for this for years, but it has never been implemented and we have been forced to add separate entries to our calendars to block out the travel time.
Hi Dean_Gross, I don't work for Microsoft so I wouldn't have any details on that but they did show off some Cortana integration with the Outlook calendar at Ignite that sounds like what you are looking for. Checkout this session.
The reminder by Cortana is definitely helpful, but it does not block out the time on the calendar which is needed to help others know about our availability when sending meeting requests.
Shared calendars viewable on mobile devices is something we've wanted for a long time and are grateful it has finally been released.
It works really well in Outlook for iOS and Android. A number of users who use other calendar apps e.g. native Calendar app on iOS and MacOS have reported a key issue as follows:
User A has access to view all details of User B's calendar as a shared calendarsUser B receives a meeting request from User C (outside the org).
When User A views the details of the meeting in shared calendar of User B. User A also appears as an invitee!
is anyone else having this issue?
- Julia Foran
Hi ta_pb
Yes - this is a known issue with the native iOS app. The native iOS calendar app always adds the current user into the attendee list even if the user is not actually on the attendee list. This issue is mentioned in the detailed support article (aka.ms/calendarsharing)
--Julia
Thanks for your speedy reply @Julia (I can't tag you). That makes sense now - your support is appreciated!
