Setting Outlook color categories by policy

[SirJacobus]

Hi all,

I´m trying to solve a customer request (regarding Offce 365) where they would like to have certain common color categories for all employees - that means, we would like to push it via server group policy/registry... 

Thing is that I´ve been googling the options for a long time and I only found a way to set the names - but no way to connect a name to a certain color... I know this was possible in the old times (Office 2007 and earlier) where both color and name category settings were stored in registry.

My current understanding is that in 365/2019 registry only supports changing of the names - which I can confirm... but I couldn´t find any way of how to connect a specific color to them. (I tried to find at least a screenshot or description of how it was done before but no luck - I also think it wouldn´t work anyway since the colours are stored in .pst file of each user)

Basically, I have 2 options then... try naming the categories in a alphabetical order somehow, until I hit the desired color... which is a bit odd since as soon as the order would be changed by someone, colours can shift anyway right.

Or, connecting to each of the user´s laptops and changing the categories locally, one-by-one... which is also not super convenient.

Thank you for any ideas

Source of the screenshot/description 

[#2]

@SirJacobus GPO is name only - the colors are added in order but I believe it picks up the next unused color for the first category - which would mean existing mailboxes could have a difference colors. Employees could delete them but they'll get added back. 

You can add them using PowerShell. Still means going computer to computer - or use a VBScript in a logon script.  I have examples of both in these articles:

VBScript example to load a text file of categories. File is laid out like this and can be created excel and saved as a csv. 

category name ,color id, shortcut id

Create a List of Color Categories to Merge or Restore (slipstick.com)

Powershell:

Use PowerShell to Export and Import Categories (slipstick.com)

[#3]

Hi @SirJacobus,

I have similar issues in front of me.
And: I have a couple of Mac-users with Mac-Outlook running in the company. So, GPO won´t work... Are there any other ideas? My intention is, that everybody can "flag" calendar-entries in the same way, company-wide. For Example: A "blue"-entry is always a Presales-Appointment, a "red" entry is always "Marketing" and so on. I would appreciate any ideas on this.

Thanks ,
Ruediger

[#4]

Log into their mailbox on windows and update using PowerShell. If the calendars you want categorized are shared calendars, they just need the right permission levels to access the categories in the shared mailbox.