Forum Discussion
Outlook Calendar Usage
In our office, we have an individual that schedules many events/meetings & invites others to these activities. She does this through her own calendar in Outlook & she is about to retire with lots of events into the future. We have a new person taking over this role & we could copy everything over to her calendar, but I assume it would be better to manage things from a "general resources" calendar. Any suggestions?
6 Replies
If you export and import to the new user's mailbox, updating or cancelling meetings will be more difficult.
Because it has meeting invites, it would be best to either make the mailbox a shared mailbox and give the new person full rights to the mailbox or just the calendar, leaving the old meetings on it. Or, if the new person needs a mailbox, give her the retiree's mailbox. You can add a new default address to the mailbox but should leave the old address as an alias.
This would also be a good time to consider if you want the new person to use her calendar or a shared mailbox calendar to use for scheduling. The advantage of a shared mailbox calendar is others can be given access to it as needed.
Thanks for the input. I like the idea of a separate, shared calendar to avoid these types of issues in the future. As for the existing, future events, it sounds like you think keeping them in the current calendar (with the new person having permissions) would be the easiest. Do you think copying or importing to a shared calendar would cause problems?
If you don't need to update or cancel the events, copying will work fine. But if they need to send updates or cancel the event, they need to do it from the original mailbox.
If you need to keep the mailbox, copy the events to a new shared mailbox and give the new person rights to the calendar so they can open it if any need canceled or updated... in this case, I would cancel the original meeting and create a new updated meeting in the new calendar.
If you don't need to keep the user's mailbox, you could repurpose the mailbox - change the display name and add a new email address and remove the license then use it as the shared calendar. If only the calendar is shared, no one will see the other folders.
- Create a Shared Mailbox in Microsoft 365
- Admin Center → Exchange Admin Center → Shared Mailboxes → Create New
- Example name: "email address removed for privacy reasons"
- Assign Full Access & Send As permissions to the new scheduler.
- Migrate Existing Events
- The retiring employee can export her calendar (.pst file) and import it into the shared mailbox.
- OR Delegate Access to the new person, allowing them to copy events.
- If multiple people need to view & contribute, a Microsoft 365 Group can be useful.
- It appears in Outlook as a separate calendar.
- To create:
Outlook → New Group → Name it (e.g., "Office Events") → Add Members.
Thanks for the feedback.
- Create a Shared Mailbox in Microsoft 365
