Forum Discussion
MicrosoftShared calendars now sync to mobile phones
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
Microsoft[Apologies for the lengthy reply but trying to address all the above questions]
Sending invitation for a shared mailbox calendar from Outlook on Windows:
Cc: Jason, Hamish
Let me follow up on this, and get back to you. We are working on updating the sharing experience in Outlook on Windows, so I might have been testing it out with early bits. In the meantime, sharing from OWA will always work.
Earlier notification of changes
Cc: Greg
What I think some of your users were seeing was that opening another person's calendar synced it to mobile. Since early 2017, accepting a shared calendar with view or edit permissions synced it to mobile, and we made what we thought was a bug-level fix to align the two "add calendar" actions (accept & open) to have the same behavior (sync to mobile). We immediately heard from admins that we should have notified them of this, and many users said that they didn't want these opened calendars to sync to mobile. You're absolutely right that I failed to give enough advance notice of that change, and I promise I'll do better next time. Based on the feedback from admins & users, we have disabled the functionality that enabled "open calendar" to also sync the calendar to mobile. Right now, only explicitly accepted calendars will sync to mobile. We do plan to re-enable the "open calendar" functionality in the future, but we need to talk to more users about expectations here. As you can see from Chris' comment, some users expect "open calendar" to also sync to mobile :-). In this TechCommunity post, I share more details about the changes that we enabled & then disabled. Would mind DM'ing me and sharing what your thoughts are on how we should handle "open calendar"?
You might be thinking, "so if calendars have been syncing to mobile since early 2017, what is this announcement about?". The major changes that came out this week was that delegated calendars would also sync to mobile (previously only view/edit was supported), and the Outlook on iOS or Android apps were updated to allow users to accept sharing invitations & also show an indication to delegates who a meeting invitation was received for.
Opening another user's calendar
Cc: Chris
We had also thought that "open calendar" and "accept" should both result in syncing from mobile. We made a change a few weeks ago that enabled that functionality. However, it sounds like there's a split among users & admins about whether or not "open calendar" should also sync to mobile (even on this thread there's differing views!). So we disabled the update for "open calendars", and right now, only calendars that are explicitly accepted from a sharing invitation will sync to mobile. There's more details in this TechCommunity post. Would mind DM'ng me and sharing what your thoughts are on how we should handle "open calendar"?
Seeing option to "edit" a read-only calendar in native iOS app
Cc: Will
This is mentioned in the support article (in the section titled "Third-party clients"). Unfortunately the native calendar apps that sync via EAS do not differentiate between read-only or read-write calendars and treat all as read-write. Users will see the option to edit a read-only calendar, or event to RSVP to a meeting invite. However, the server rejects these because the user does not have edit permissions, and nothing is actually written to the service. The "edits" are local only in that app. If the calendar recipient goes to view the calendar in an Outlook app, they won't see the edits. This is a reason that we recommend all shared calendar users to use the Outlook mobile apps because they do differentiate between the different permission levels, and read-only users won't be offered any edit options in the Outlook on iOS and Android apps.
Follow-up for everyone, it appears the account did have full permission even though it was not showing it in the calendar. After more testing the permissions are working correctly and only giving us view access as needed :-)
Sent you a PM and yes I show as "Reviewer" for this calendar shared to me from Outlook 2016 for Windows.
- Julia Foran
Hi Will, are you sure that you don't have edit permissions via Full Access or via a security group somehow? Would you please DM me the email addresses of the calendar owner & the calendar recipient?
With reguard to the native iOS calendar app deleting/adding items and the server rejecting the request based on my permission that is not the case per our testing.
I do not have permission to add or delete anything, just view. However when using the native iOS calendar app I was able to delete items i did not create and add new items to the calendar. Both of these changes synced to the server calendar and the users could see the changes in Outlook 2016 for Windows.