Forum Discussion
MicrosoftShared calendars now sync to mobile phones
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
MicrosoftHi 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