Forum Discussion
MicrosoftShared calendars now sync to mobile phones
I was doing some testing this morning. I couldn't find out how to make it work with a calendar from a "Shared Mailbox". I didn't see how in OWA or Outlook iOS to send an invite to another user. That was part of the stipulation of how it works - you need to send a sharing invite using a mobile app or OWA and the person needs to accept the invite in OWA or an Outlook mobile app.
I did however get it to work with a calendar that I created under my own 365 account. That calendar showed up under my account settings in Outlook iOS then I invited a co-worker. Then he accepted the invite via Outlook iOS. He could then see my shared calendar in his Outlook iOS app, native iOS calendar (!!) and Outlook PC calendar.
If someone can confirm that this SHOULD work with a "Shared Mailbox" calendar and provide some instructions on how to do that, what would be awesome!
Thanks,
Jason
MicrosoftHi Andrew, John, & Jason,
Thanks for your feedback! To answer the questions:
Support article link:
Good catch on that link. Sorry about that -- it's been updated to point to this support article.
Shared mailboxes
- Yes, it works for shared mailboxes as well.
- You can share the calendar from any Outlook application, as long as you send a sharing invitation so that the recipient can accept from Outlook on the web, iOS, or Android. This applies to user, resource, and shared mailboxes.
- From Outlook on the web: Login to your own mailbox first, and then click your picture in the top right to view Account options. There will be an option to "Open another mailbox". Enter the shared mailbox name to login to the shared mailbox via OWA. After you're logged into the shared mailbox, you can navigate to the Calendar module & share the calendar to yourself or to other users. Then you (or the other users) just need to accept the invitation from Outlook on the web, iOS, or Android.
- From Outlook on Windows and Mac: These clients only offer an option to send a sharing invitation for read-only permissions. Accepting invitation sent from Windows/Mac will work, but people have asked how to grant edit permissions for a shared mailbox calendar (since it doesn't currently send an invitation)? A workaround would be to (1) send a sharing invitation from Outlook on Windows/Mac for read-only permissions, (2) update the calendar permissions in the Folder Permissions dialog (that doesn't send an email) to Editor, (3) have the recipient accept the calendar from the original sharing invitation. Even though the original invitation was for read-only permissions, the calendar will be added as editable because that is the effective permissions.
Hi Julia
I have a problem. I used outlook.com for a longer time and it was just fine. But after the big update of outlook.com, the ability to choose my own e-mail (like stefan.k....@synor.ch) as sender was lost. In outlook.com online it works, but if you use Outlook Desktop, it won't work anymore (before I did work!).
As second I shared my calendar with my girlfriends outlook.com account (she uses the iPhone calendar) and it worked pretty well. This did work before the change of outlook.com and after the change it worked also well.
But because I'm self-employed, I want to use my own e-mail with my own domain (like I said: stefan.k....@synor.ch instead of stefan.k....@outlook.com).
That was the reason that I changed to the paid Exchange Online Version.
I thought that with the paid version, all would be possible - but sadly it isn't!
Now I'm able to have my own sender e-mail with own domain, that works.
But this does not work with the calendar share to an external outlook.com address!
That means it only works if I pay for another Exchange Online user for my girlfriend!
But I found this totally annoying!
If the new outlook.com is based on the technology of Exchange, it would be easy to offer this sharing function also for Exchange Online !?
Could you add this please?
Because I pay now, but I haven't the full functionality.
Except you say that they will soon reintroduce the function in outlook.com, where you can define your own senders also in Outlook desktop again. Then I would switch again to this free offer.
Thanks a lot for your answer
Sincerely
Stefan
In my profile here, there my name will be "null null". I can't change it to "Stefan Krapf". It won't be saved... :-(
- Julia Foran
Hi Stefan,
I would recommend reaching out to Outlook.com Support for help with this issue, as it will require some debugging with a support agent. What you need is true support for custom domains, which is not specific to the calendar.
Also, your question is not related to the content on this post (which is about shared calendar calendars sync'ing to mobile phones). In the future, please create a new post to help keep the forum threads organized. :-)
--Julia
Julia:
Thanks for the heads up on the article re: new features.
I was particularly interested in the "instant sync" feature. I have been working on a project (for a couple of years) that really needs this capability. Briefly it involves an application that publishes highly changeable schedules to a calendar and then shares these calendars with selected individuals through their own accounts. As long as the calendars are in the same tenant this works fine on O365 and updates almost istantaneous. When the calendars exist in different tenants the result (as you know) is that the calendars take 4+ hours to sync.
When I read the referenced article, I noted that although "instant sync" wasn't available between two O365 accounts (yet?), however it was available between Oulook.com and O365. Unfortunately I missed the part of the article that said that "instant sync" was not compatiple with EWS.
NOTE: Exchange Web Services (EWS) API will not support instant syncing.
We are using EWS to push this data to the first calendar so that it can be shared to others.
We did observe a bunch of anomolies when we tried this between an Outlook.com account and a O365 account.
With that not working, we decided to try the MS Graph api, however, I thought I would check to see if the would have the same issues as EWS had with "instant sync".
Any other suggestions would also be appreciated.
Thanks for taking all the customer feedback to advance the O365 platform.
Thx
Bill
- Julia Foran
Hi Bill,
- We do plan to support instant sync'ing across tenants in the future. Today, instant syncing is supported only when sharing within an Office365 tenant, or sharing from an Outlook.com account to another Outlook.com user or an Office365 user.
- Clients also need to make updates to take advantage of instant syncing. So even if two users are in the same tenant, they won't (yet) see updates instantly in Outlook on Windows or Mac.
- If you're using EWS, you can edit the owner's calendar & it will instantly sync to other sharees (assuming the above two bullets are taken into account). However, if a recipient has edit access to the calendar, you cannot use EWS when the recipient is editing the calendars.
- I'm not sure when you tested, but we just recently enabled instant syncing for sharing from Outlook.com to an Office365 user, so that might have been the issue.
Julia:
It's been a while since I have been able to work on this project, so apologies for not getting back to you sooner.
We (almost) successfully transitioned our EWS application to Microsoft Graph. Some of the syncing issues still remain. These mostly involve updating a large number (>100) of events on a calendar which is syncing to another calendar. If we delete all the events on a calendar and then add new ones, and run this cycle every 1 to 2 minutes we ultimately see events get duplicated on the "shared" calendar. This probably comes from the delete process not completing before the add process starts. On our side we wait for the delete process to complete before starting the add process but it seems to take a long time and it looks like something is getting confused on the Exchange side. This happened frequently with EWS but still exists to some extent with Graph.
As it is important for our customers to get the integration going we looked at only updating changes in the schedules. This has worked much more reliably as the changes do not generate the volume of data that the full schedules did. Briefly we are reading the current schedule from our application and comparing it to the events loaded in exchange by querying them through Graph. At this point we delete/add only schedules that have changed.
I do think that someone should look at the inability of the system to handle a higher load as I'm sure there will be plenty of developers who try the same thing I did. Let me know if I can provide any details to facilitate further progress.
As a last (and somewhat related) point, the inability for OWA to correctly handle "all day" events properly has been on going for a while. Briefly an "all day" event on a calendar posted in one time zone would show incorrectly on a calendar that was set in another time zone. What would usually happen is that the "all day" event in the original time zone would show for 1 day but it would span 2 days in a different time zone.
There has been a forum discussion relating to this and as of the end of Jan 2018 it seems to have been addressed by Microsoft.
See Jennifer Lu's response at the end of this link.
https://social.techn
et.microsoft.com/For ums/lync/en-US/2a0e0 22b-b216-49d9-a421-f 32ab74238ae/all-day- calendar-events-and- different-time-zones ?forum=outlook We have noted an addition problem with this that seems to reside as a UI issue when populating all day events using Graph. Please see my response to Jennifer on that forum. I'd be interested in helping to get this resolved.
Again, as always, thanks for making yourself available and helping to push the quality of Office 365 forward.
Regards
Bill
Hi Julia,
Thanks so much for the additional information. We've been looking forward to this feature for a long time.
I'm currently testing with a "Shared Mailbox" calendar. I followed your steps for sharing it via "Outlook on the Web (OWA)" and that worked just fine. 1) Login to my OWA, 2) 'Open other user mailbox' and get into the shared mailbox 3) go to the calendar and hit the Share button. I can even select edit permissions and they worked great. The person that accepted the invite in Outlook for iOS was able to see the calendar in Outlook for iOS, Outlook for PC and even iOS native calendar app. They made some changes and it successfully synced back.
However I'm still not having any luck trying to send a sharing invite from Outlook on the PC. I'm on the latest Outlook 2016 click-to-run edition so I should have all of the latest features. Through the Office 365 admin portal Shared Mailbox interface, i've given myself full permission to the mailbox and I can see the calendar in Outlook for PC. But when I right-click on the calendar and hit Share, my only option is to "Email Calendar" which I believe just sends a static copy of my calendar via an ICS attachment. The "Share Calendar" option is greyed out.
If someone has had luck sending a sharing invite for a "Shared Mailbox" calendar via Outlook for PC, please let me know how you did it.
Thanks again!
Jason
- Exact same problem, admin user couldn't do it either.
Great to see this functionality on the way!
How can I send a sharing invite from a shared calendar that doesn't have an attached shared mailbox?
Has anyone answered this question? I have a public folder calendar that will not share to IOS.
So this is a great update and long over due, however I can not help but feel that this feels clunky. The fact that you can not use previously shared calendars and you have to accept it from the web or iOS is odd.
Is this some sort of desktop issue this will be fixed at some point with Windows and Mac?
- Julia Foran
Hi Will,
I agree that the story should be simple: share & accept from any client, and have the awesome new experience everywhere. That is certainly the plan, and where we want to be, but it's a journey to get there. Today's release is just step #1 :-).
Some more details:
- Windows & Mac: The web, iOS & Android clients were able to finish their changes sooner so that's why it's currently accept from one of those three. We're working on a way to detect accepts from Windows clients without any client changes (including legacy clients like Outlook 2013) and plan to release those changes in Q4, which would change the statement to "Accept from any Outlook client but Mac". The Mac client has always stored the list of shared calendars in a local list on the computer, so there's no magic we can do in the service to detect those accepts. To include Mac in the list of clients that you can accept from, changes are being made in the Mac client. Updating shared calendars support (for sharing, accepting, & syncing) is a top priority for Windows & Mac, and you can expect more updates about those clients as timelines become clearer.
- Existing shared calendars: We wanted to have an "opt-in" model for a few months before we started upgrading existing calendars. There are hundreds of millions of shared calendars in the system, so it will take a while for us to upgrade them all. Having an early, opt-in release allows us to get feedback before we start automatically upgrading all shared calendars. But existing shared calendars will be automatically upgraded in the future (no timeline yet though).
So we just tested this today and the shared calendar did show up in the Outlook iOS app.
However we discovered a possible BIG bug. The shared calendar also shows up and is viewable in the default iOS Calendar app, and while that is ok, I was able to delete and add items from the shared calendar even though I did NOT have any permission but reviewer. We confirmed the settings by checking the properties, then permissions of the calendar and the delete option was set to NONE and I was labled as reviewer. We confirmed the default and annonomous settings were set to none as well.
On the iOS app I could not delete or add anything.
We tested this on a iphone runing iOS 11
