Forum Discussion
A series of questions about outlook calendar company settings
Hi, I'm going to apologise in advance as I'm not super techy so some of my language is probably a bit basic but I hope I can explain in simple terms what I am looking to do. I have, as standard, gone to Google with all of these questions at some point in time but the solutions I have found either didn't work and flagged an error or I perhaps didn't have a strong enough understanding of the tech to be able to properly follow or troubleshoot on the seemingly more complex ones!
I work for a small company and we have Microsoft 365 Business with premium licensing. I have full admin rights, if it's helpful to know.
The first thing I want to do is create a 'contact' for All Staff so that I can keep it up to date centrally and then users can type in 'all staff' when sending an email. I've managed to create this for myself and tried to share it with my CEO but it didn't actually share and I cannot work out how to make this Contact list universally accessible.
The second thing is that we have team birthdays in our calendar. I'd ideally like to be able to create something where, again, I can update a central record of birthdays and it automatically appears in all of our staff calendars in the same way as bank holidays do. As it currently stands I have schedulers coming from my calendar that I need to constantly add or remove and also add and remove staff as they change (which is fairly frequent and a real pain). I know that the birthday calendar exists, but I think that it will only be populated/visible on an individual basis as I understand it?
The third thing is, I'd like our internal calendars to be shared as an automatic setting. People could, ideally, be able to restrict them if they needed to, but every time a team member starts they manually share calendars with everyone, sometimes they forget someone (in the absence of an all staff contact?) or sometimes there are delays to people getting around to it, so it would just be so much easier to have it as an automatic setting.
If anyone can help with any of the above I'd be really really grateful!
Thanks 🙂
- #1 is easily addressed by creating an "All staff" group, be it "traditional" distribution group, dynamic one or "modern" Office 365 one. The one you have created is local to your mailbox, and while it can be shared out, it's not the best experience. Instead, DGs/Groups are created at the tenant level and are visible to all users by default (you can hide them if needed). You can also apply restrictions as to who can send messages to such a group, or enable moderation, etc.
Here's an example on how to use Dynamic rule: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/enterprise-users/groups-dynamic-membership#create-an-all-users-rule
#2 is a bit tricker, as there is no "best" solution for the "company-wide" calendar scenario. You can for example combine it with #1 by using a (dynamic) Office 365 Group, which features a Calendar as well, and populate the events/birthdays therein. Or have the Calendar reside in someone's personal mailbox, then share it out. Or use a SharePoint-base done. Each method has its pros and cons, no universal solution sadly.
#3 can be addressed by periodically running a PowerShell script. Unfortunately there is no single setting you can toggle and you will have to rerun this every time a new user is added. But it's fairly easy:
$calendars = Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox | Get-MailboxFolderStatistics -FolderScope Calendar | ? {$_.FolderType -eq "Calendar"} | select @{n="Identity"; e={$_.Identity.ToString().Replace("\",":\")}}
$calendars | % {Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity $_.Identity -User Default -AccessRights LimitedDetails}
