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!
Yes, thank you Mike Tilson and Julia. It does clear a few things up. The only thing is how to remove the calendars from the Native IOS calendar app? We do not see a way of doing this besides removing it from outlook or owa and then letting it propagate. Sure the case is 117112717223740. Thankfully it has now been escalated to another engineer and hopefully we can get this answer in a more formal format so that we can dispense to management.
To remove from the native iOS calendar app do the following:
- Open the calendar app
- Select Calendars at the bottom
- Select the circled i beside the calendar you want to remove
- Select delete calendar
We seem to have run into this and wondering if there is a powershell Cmd to remove it from OWA? Thomas Mendorf
Everyone,
following above instructions to remove the calendar from iOS calendar app did not work for us - with iOS 11 the delete option does not show up. However, one would be able to deselect the calendar for visually showing up in the native calendar app. Be aware that due to some iOS bug users with an Apple Watch seem to get still reminders for meetings set up in the calendars that they chose to not show in the calendar app (that is, getting reminders on the Watch, as well as new calendar invites on both Watch and iPhone).
The only practical way to remove another persons calendar from your mobile (if synchronized via Exchange ActiveSync) in our case was to let users log in to OWA, then have them remove the additional calender from the OWA calendar view. This would not remove the calendar from Outlook clients on PC or Mac, but remove it from OWA and ActiveSync devices. Just deselecting the "Show calendar" option in native iOS calendar app was not the way to go for us due to the iOS bug.
It would be great if these side effects could be mentioned in the calendar access invitation emails that get sent from O365 (like, "if you click on the button to accept the access invitation be informed that this will add the persons calendar on your mobile phone") or just name the button "add calendar to all my devices".
Issues around this behavior were difficult to analyze due to the fact that only peoples calendars were affected that recently had been granted access to, or changed access rights, as well as mostly manager calendars being affected. People and our service desk would typically have checked the access rights on the shared calendar itself instead of the reporting users calendar list in OWA (in our organization, most people would not even know about OWA). Hey Microsoft, there's room for improvement here.
