Forum Discussion
Syncing a shared outlook calendar with Teams
I work for a small and not very tech-savvy company.
We have a shared Outlook Calendar for recording staff leave.
I have set up a new shared channel calendar in Teams to use in future as it's fiddly to add new staff, but there are a few existing staff who don't use Teams regularly and prefer the old shared Outlook calendar. Is there any way to sync the two?
HelenMBradt No, not really.
A Channel Calendar is a rather odd thing, it uses the underlying group calendar that you could see in Outlook, but it uses a hidden attribute to indicate for each appointment to define which channel it refers to, then the channel calendar filters by that attribute. Although you can add appointments to the calendar from Outlook you can't set this attribute so they will never show in the channel calendar. Any other sync approach would have the same limitation.
Is it not just better to have people record their holiday in their own calendars, so it shows in their free/busy for people booking meetings. Then use Outlook to view all the calendars at once using a calendar group?
- Thanks.
I agree it is an odd way of doing things, but it is the way people have been doing things and I am trying to wean them slowly onto using Teams as most people are remote and it makes more sense than some of the workarounds they are using now.
All I need to do is to be able to sync this Outlook calendar with the Teams channel calendar. All the appointments in the Outlook calendar need to display in Teams, so the attribute issue you mention wouldn't be a problem.
