Shared calendars now sync to mobile phones

Microsoft

We are rolling out a feature update that enables shared calendars to sync to mobile phones. This update will make it possible to sync all your Office365 shared calendars to your mobile phone for any permission level (view, edit, or delegate permissions). In addition, you can now share a calendar or accept shared calendar invitations from Outlook on iOS and Android.

 

Existing shared calendars will not be upgraded as part of this change, and they will continue to sync only to Outlook on the web, Windows, and Mac. Only shared calendars that are accepted after these changes are released will sync to mobile phones.

 

The shared calendar will only sync to mobile phones if:

  • The calendar is shared between users who are both hosted in Exchange Online
  • The calendar is accepted from a sharing invitation using Outlook on the web, iOS, or Android

 

We'll be gradually rolling this update starting on 9/18 and rollout will be completed by 9/22.

 

You can find more details about shared calendar improvements at the article located here.

117 Replies

Julia,

We are loving the new shared calendar features, as we've discussed the past week.

 

Do you know if there are plans for similar functionality around using the mailbox portion of a "Shared Mailbox"?   We were so exicted to see that the calendar part worked but then we noticed that we can't see anything email related in the mobile apps.   And i didn't see any way to send a sharing invite from my mailbox view.

 

We still need a solution to be able to see a shared email account like sales@company.com on a mobile device.

 

Thanks!

Jason

How about shared contacts, will this apply to them as well? If so is them method to add them the same as the calendars?

Apologies for delay in responding! Have been busy at Microsoft Ignite conference this week.

 

@Jason Hartman
Yes -- this update works for calendars from user mailboxes, resource mailboxes, or shared mailboxes. You just need to send a sharing invitation from the shared mailbox so that the user can accept on web, iOS, or Android. The easiest way to send an invitation from a shared mailbox is to use Outlook on the web to open it. A little earlier in the thread I gave instructions on how to do that, and realized it's not possible (yet) from the Windows client, so you will need to share from the web.

 

Part of the thinking behind syncing "opened calendars" (not just "accepted calendars") to mobile phones was to make it easier for this to work for resource & shared mailboxes, so that you didn't have to login & send the sharing invitation. As you know, we disabled the "opened calendars" part due to feedback, and will re-enable it when we only sync calendars that you have explicit permissions to (rather than permissions via the default user).

 

@Becky Martin
There are no plans to support this for shared mail folders or shared contact folders. The best way to give feedback on those plans is to upvote the feature on outlook.uservoice.com in the iOS & Android forums.

Hello,

 

is there some possibility to turn off this feature? We have got problem in our company with Android users - they have synced everything in one calendar, so they can't turn off shared mailbox in their smartphones, because it is part of one calendar. So they have "spamed" calendar on Android with foreign events.


Thank you very much for informations,

Jakub Krňák

Hi Jakub,

 

It won't be possible to disable this at the tenant level. We hope that the native calendar apps start showing the different calendars, but an alternative would be for your users to use the Outlook for Android application which does differentiate between calendars.

 

--Julia

Thank you very much for your reply Julia, I will informate my coleagues.

There is problem only on Android, iOS is OK :)

 

Have a nice day,
Jakub

Same here. Users get confused that calendar events which they do not planned are in their calendar also with reminders for some of our users. Also getting just open calendar on Outlook and after that it get synced is odd for some.

Yes Petr, exactly same here. And you know, when I say them "just install Outlook app, I use it too, it's better" ... they say "I like this native app" or "I am accustomed to this app" :D

So I hope for solution in next Android update.

@julia Is it possible to mute notifications from the other calendars. I have a person who is getting meeting reminders on their mobile from these other sync'd calendars. How do we stop that?

@Greg Tiber - That should not be happening because on the sharee copy of the calendar, we set the popup reminder value to "None" for all events. Can you send me a private message with a screenshot of what the event looks like in Outlook on the web?

Hi Julia, some of our customer experience the same on Windows Mobile with Outlook. They receiving notifications about events from shared calendars. I will try to catch the details with customers and send you these.

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

Hi 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: I tried to send you a private message on this forum, but it does not allow me to do it. Can I contact you on LinkedIn or etc?
Sure thing!

I first encountered the same problem with the calendar events of other persons in my own calendar using Samsung Calendar in my old Samsung S4 with Android 6.x. One week ago I started to use a Samsung S8 with Android 7.x and I installed Outlook on it. After using it for one week I suddenly had a mix of one other person's events (a shared calendar in my own organization that I had opened once and closed) and my own events. It seems like the last calendar of the other person I have opened with my Outlook on Windows 10 always get synchronized with my mobile Outlook on Android. I have found no way to stop this from happening. My mobile Outlook has become a mess, although my Outlook on Windows 10 is as tidy as before.

In the new Android version I found that I can tick off the other Calendar that has come up after opening it in Outlook for Windows. So, the problem how to get it off is solved.

Hi Julia

I have a problem. I used outlook.com for a longer time and it was just fine. But after the big update of outlook.com, the ability to choose my own e-mail (like stefan.k....@synor.ch) as sender was lost. In outlook.com online it works, but if you use Outlook Desktop, it won't work anymore (before I did work!).

As second I shared my calendar with my girlfriends outlook.com account (she uses the iPhone calendar) and it worked pretty well. This did work before the change of outlook.com and after the change it worked also well.

But because I'm self-employed, I want to use my own e-mail with my own domain (like I said: stefan.k....@synor.ch instead of stefan.k....@outlook.com).

That was the reason that I changed to the paid Exchange Online Version.

I thought that with the paid version, all would be possible - but sadly it isn't!

 

Now I'm able to have my own sender e-mail with own domain, that works.

But this does not work with the calendar share to an external outlook.com address!

That means it only works if I pay for another Exchange Online user for my girlfriend!

 

But I found this totally annoying!

If the new outlook.com is based on the technology of Exchange, it would be easy to offer this sharing function also for Exchange Online !?

 

Could you add this please?

Because I pay now, but I haven't the full functionality.

Except you say that they will soon reintroduce the function in outlook.com, where you can define your own senders also in Outlook desktop again. Then I would switch again to this free offer.

 

Thanks a lot for your answer

Sincerely

Stefan

 

In my profile here, there my name will be "null null". I can't change it to "Stefan Krapf". It won't be saved... :(

Hi Stefan,

 

I would recommend reaching out to Outlook.com Support for help with this issue, as it will require some debugging with a support agent. What you need is true support for custom domains, which is not specific to the calendar.

 

Also, your question is not related to the content on this post (which is about shared calendar calendars sync'ing to mobile phones). In the future, please create a new post to help keep the forum threads organized. :)

 

--Julia