Forum Discussion
How to create a shared company calendar for time off and holidays?
I'M LOST
I have spent DAYS trying to figure out some way to provide a shared company calendar with Holidays, PTO Schedules, On-Call Schedules, etc. We just want one place to see what's going on this week, who's available, and do we have a day off this week. BASIC information. After spending more than 3 days on this, I feel more lost than I did when I started.
I could create a SharePoint Calendar. This calendar doesn't sync with Outlook for Mac or Apple Calendars and, most importantly, reoccurring events don't show up on a SharePoint Events web part. I could manually create reoccurring events but I rather not. Regardless, the functionality is incredibly limited.
I could create a new M365 user. This would let me see these calendar in Apple Calendars and give myself or another admin access to update events. But this calendar can't be integrated in SharePoint or Teams so it's basically invisible.
I could create a Channel Calendar in Teams but that's certainly not appropriate.
I could create a new Group with a Calendar. Although, we already have a org-Wide Team and it doesn't actually do anything - can't email orgteam@company.com and it doesn't come with an Outlook calendar. I don't think I should have to add someone to a group for them to see a calendar I want public to the entire company. This might be the best compromise but that's besides the point.
The POINT is, WHY in the world isn't this a built-in feature that's turned on the moment a company creates a M365 tenant? WHY do I need to spend days figuring out that all the archaic tutorials from 2017 don't even work in 2021? WHY can't MICROSOFT make calendars easy? I mean, I'd settle for difficult - it's better than impossible.
And, not for nothing, I look like a complete idiot (I very well may be!) when my boss asks me to do something that should take 2 minutes and I have absolutely nothing to show 3 days later.
Q: What is your business doing to let you know you have Memorial day off? How are you able to see if someone has the week off for vacation? Are you using a M365 product or something else?
26 Replies
Wow. This is old...
Here's the solution I've come up with. It's not ideal.
TL;DR: Just use Outlook and SharePoint. Make sure groups are displayed in Outlook. Add Group Calendar web part to SharePoint.
The first thing we had to do was (compromise 1) ditch the hope of accessing the calendar outside Microsoft 365. The calendar is only accessible in Outlook and SharePoint.
I think one big issue I had was that Groups and their calendars were not being displayed in Outlook by default. I had to use Powershell to enable this. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/troubleshoot/groups-and-distribution-lists/microsoft-365-group-does-not-appear-in-outlook#resolution
Company Communications Calendar
We have an org-wide Company Communications Group/Team with a calendar in Outlook. I can easily create an event like Memorial day and have it repeat every last Monday of May.
How to get this in SharePoint? You can add a Group calendar web part in a Sharepoint page. However, (compromise 2) it only shows as a list, not a calendar.
I guess this solves the larger issue but at some point I decided I wanted the staff calendar seperate.
Staff Calendar
I have another Group called Staff Calendar. For this, I built a Birthday PowerApp that I've embedded in SharePoint and a PTO PowerApp that I uploaded to Teams. Both of these have PowerAutomate actions upon submission.
- For a Birthday, there's an action to create the event in the group calendar and then update its properties to repeat every year on the same day.
- For a Day Off, there's a workflow to request a day off. This workflow adds an item to a SharePoint List, prompts the supervisor in Teams for approval (logs the approval results in the List), adds the PTO to the group calendar, adds a record to the employee's folder (in SharePoint), sends an email to HR with links to the approval record and calendar event, updates the List with links to events and records.
So, if you're keeping track; there are two group calendars in Outlook and two web parts in SharePoint - which are lists, not grid-like calendars. You could do it all in one group but I didn't.
I guess the other big fix for this was creating apps for users to submit information. This way, instead of asking people to give me their info or having them screw with the calendar, I have a workflow doing the work and keeping things consistent. I wouldn't be surprised if you could pull this together with CoPilot or something now.
Hope this helps someone, four years later.
Thank you for providing your insight on this -- worthwhile thread necro!
Would you mind pointing me in the direction of how you created your workflows for approval? I'd love to replicate your efforts.
same here - incredible that we still cannot have a calendar for all these purposes especially as we have an intranet and this request comes up but no improvements from MS side on functionality thanks
it's 2025 and I am revisiting this. Has anyone (including Microsoft) come up with a solution for this? We need a calendar that shows only when people are OOO for whatever reason, and public holidays. This should be dynamically updated via Outlook and visible to everyone.
Just found this where it suggests using a shared Groups calendar: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/block-out-vacation-time-on-a-group-calendar-in-outlook-89a68e9f-9ad0-4088-9b73-7352e051a4a4#id0ebf=new_outlook
hi, have you figured it out? I am trying to do the same as you... we used to use google calendar, as it seems a lot easier and visible, but I want us to use 365 for everything, since the google accounts are personal
I have not figured it out and have not seen any additional comments from anyone either.
- I use Public Folders in Exchange. You'll have to create a public folder mailbox, and users will need to add the calendar to their favorites in Outlook. I came here looking for a different solution, but it doesn't look like one really exists.
Any updates to this thread- I am also being asked as users are manualy entering holidays and vacations and sending invites to each other to block calendars etc...Has any new way to do this been developed by Microsoft
I am leveraging the shared calendar through Teams channel which SharePoint Online supported from the back, may I know this is what you want as well?
- It is built-in. Just use the org-wide team you already have https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business-video/org-wide-team?view=o365-worldwide
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/create-an-org-wide-team
https://practical365.com/create-an-all-company-team-for-better-communications-and-to-enable-cross-department-chat/- Those links are all guides on creating a org-wide team, which I already have. I'm looking for help about making a shared calendar.
- Did you ever figure this out? Looking for the same thing - create a view only (but can copy to own calendar) company calendar solution.
