Forum Discussion

bart_vermeersch's avatar
bart_vermeersch
Steel Contributor
Sep 22, 2017

Sharing your calendar within a department or team

I would like to discuss the best way of sharing a personal calendar with your coworkers/team/department

 

We often get requests of a groups of people they want to share their personal calendar with each other. We used AD security groups for this (often mail enabled), but would like to know if there are better solutions since we gradually move online. 

 

We are pushing towards Office 365 groups, so people can manage the group members themselves but these groups can't be assigned calendar permissions.

 

 

We want to avoid creating multiple type of groups with identical members.

 

Any suggestions on best practices in this quickly evolving landscape?

 

Thanks!

Calendar
  • Julia Foran's avatar
    Julia Foran
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    Sep 24, 2017
    Hi Bart, the best way to share availability to colleagues is to use the "My organization" user (previously known as Default user). This is the default level of permissions that others in your organization will have when viewing your primary calendar availability in tools like Scheduling Assistant. Most companies will set this permission level by default when creating mailboxes, so that the default within the company is to share only free/busy information. You can also run a script to set it for existing mailboxes. With this approach, you won't have to setup security groups or asks users to manage membership. In your post, you mentioned that they only want to share with certain groups of people, but I'd be interested to know if your users are against sharing their availability to everybody in the company. Certainly makes scheduling a lot easier, and not having to manage lots of groups is a positive as well.
    • bart_vermeersch's avatar
      bart_vermeersch
      Steel Contributor
      Sep 25, 2017

      Hi Julia, I agree it's the easiest approach.

       

      The default sharing setting is already set to sharing free/busy.

       

      We see a movement of departement heads convincing their teams to share limited details with everyone within a departement. Sharing this info with the entire organization is one step too far.

       

      For our scenario it would have been perfect of we could use O365 groups, that way it 's completely self-service and users don't have to send sharing invitations everytime there is a new hire.

       

      PS Good to know the default user is changed into My organization.

       

      Bart

Resources