Forum Discussion
Exchange Online shared calendars on mobile devices
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.
Hi Arnold. I do feel as though my question was answered.
Many of our users have permissions set for the default user (everyone). When the Microsoft calendar team first made the change for calendars to appear on mobile devices they assumed if you opened a calendar from Outlook on the desktop (maybe web too?) that you were "accepting" the calendar even if you only had permissions via the default user. What would happen is our users would "calendar surf" in Outlook and those calendars were showing up on their mobile devices (Apple Mail & Outlook mobile). There is no fix that I am aware of to remove those from the admin side, the users would have to remove the calendars from the mobile devices but they should not reappear. Microsoft has changed that behavior to a new sharing model where you have to explicitly share your calendar with someone for it to show up on their mobile device. I spoke personally with Julia at Ignite in September to better understand this issue. Hope this helps.
