Calendar - Category - Colors

[Eric Deferm]

Many of our users are assigning Category > Colors to their appointments (created in OWA or Outlook for Windows, all running on EOL & O365).  When we Add Calendars > From Directory in OWA some of the calendars are showing the original colors for each appointment, other calendars are showing all appointments with the same color
 What could be the reason for this different behavior, causing appointments from some calendars to display with original colors and for other calendar ignoring the colors?
How can we make this behavior consistent?

[#2]

This has to do with the way Outlook stores information about the (color) categories. You need to have at least Reviewer permissions on any shared resource you want to see the color info from.

@Diane Poremsky has a detailed article on this here: https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/outlook-categories-and-color-categories/

[#3]

Hi Vasil, tx for you quick reply and link to great article about Outlook categories and color categories. The article from @diane poremskey is mainly talking about the Outlook for Windows application. How do we control/setup/configure similar color-settings if we only use Outlook for Web?

[#4 · Accepted solution]

The client doesn’t matter - the permissions the users have on the calendars is the key. If they don’t have high enough permissions, they won’t see the colors. (If they have the same categories in their mailbox, they might see colors on those calendars.)

[#5]

Hi Vasil, I've been searching via the Exchange admin center, found the 'Permissions' , but couldn't locate anything about 'Reviewer' permissions. Can you give me hint where to look after?

[#6]

That's the folder level "reviewer" permission, sorry if I wasn't clear. If you want to set it on behalf of the user, use PowerShell and the Add/Set-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet.

[#7]

Hi Vasil , tx for the reply. Using PowerShell we were able to compare the Calendar settings for different users and discovered the origin of the confusion. It's clear now why it's working for some users are not for other users. The Calendar folder has Default (Org), Anonymous and Individual access settings.

They can be set at creation and afterwards modified by the user.

Setting the access level to 'View all details' allows other users to see the different colors.

It all seems very obvious now. Tx for your feedback.

[#8]

Glad you got it working, and sorry for not being clear. I'll take a note and try to be more descriptive in the future :)