Types of group and shared calendars in Office365 - Outlook, Teams, SharePoint

Types of group and shared calendars in Office365 - Outlook, Teams, SharePoint

   20:14       Mateusz Burzyński

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Despite the title, you do not need the Office365 license to use some of the calendars described. However, the article also touches on the issues of configuring a shared calendar, for which an Office365 license is necessary.

The common calendar and its correct configuration, so that each team member can view and - above all - edit the calendar presents too many difficulties. The situation is not facilitated by the fact that this element of Office365 did not work out well.

One of the tasks I faced in my professional life was, among others implementation of Office365 at law firm, and therefore setting up a shared calendar for a group of lawyers so that each team member can look into the calendar, receive notifications and, above all, edit it. What is the problem you will ask? Well, it's hard to figure out which type of calendar we should use for this task. We have at least a few of them, and a specific calendar type is suitable for this type of task.

A few words about internet calendars

The calendar has a built-in Outlook and probably 99% of other email programs, however it is an individual calendar. What can we do with this calendar? In addition to printing and hanging on the wall, there is not much - we can export the calendar and share it with other team members in a special universal format for recording events from calendars. .ICS files are completely pointless.

Another solution is to use the webDAV server, but it is not very convenient, because we need a special server for a relatively simple operation, which is to set a simple event calendar for team members.

How to do it in Office365

In Office365, I counted from four (yes - four) types of calendars, which I will describe below:

1. Personal Outlook calendar in cloud

The calendar built into Outlook, described above - is synchronized only within our account.

2. Shared and group calendar

Calendar, which requires Office365. The problem is that Outlook is only available in the Business Premium package (!). It is not possible to create a shared calendar in Business Essentials because it does not have the Outlook service and Microsoft Exchange server, which is described below.

The shared calendar works more or less as we expect - each team member (whom we authorize in the administrative panel) receives in their Outlook (in the desktop / mobile / browser version) a kind of "attachment" in the Calendars section.

This calendar works only on Outlook. This means that a person who does not have an email in the Office365 service will not be able to use this calendar, due to the "special" server in which Outlook accounts are equipped - Microsoft Exchange.

Using this calendar is quite difficult, because when editing events in Outlook, we must remember to select only the group calendar. Editing with a few calendars at a time usually only updates our personal calendar. And since both calendars overlap in the program, it is much more difficult.

Another downside of this calendar is the problem with the color of bookmarks and labels - they are not saved globally. This means that unless we implement a carefully uniform system of markings on all computers, after a while the calendar will start to look like a garbage bin, because bookmarks and labels are loaded from a local install of a Outlook.

To sum up - this is practically only a sensible solution for a shared calendar in Office365.

3. Calendar tab in Microsoft Teams

After opening Microsoft Teams (to which I will come back in the entries) a bar appears, from which the "Calendar" attracts attention.

It turns out that this is another, completely separate type of calendar. Having an account in Office365 and Teams installed, we have a separate personal calendar in Outlook, as well as a separate Calendar in Microsoft Teams.

I find this solution very confusing and non-intuitive. It's hard to guess what ideas guided the developers of Teams, you can only guess that this calendar is only used to write dates on Teams, which has some advantages and some sense, however, further multiplication of calendars and events recorded in it is simply a waste of time, and despite appearances can help to miss an event or situation in which the proliferation of events in different calendars will make us resistant to notifications and we will simply forget about an important event.

Another disadvantage of such a calendar is, however, that the calendar in Teams cannot be in any way either bought or exported (even to ICS!) or shared. All that's left is to manually copy the events. I searched the entire Office365 administration, dozens of pages and forums. If someone decided to keep a calendar in Microsoft Teams, then I have bad news for him, because if the servers are down or the developers decide to remove this function - the calendar would probably be lost entirely (!). In addition, we have access to this calendar only in the Teams application - it cannot be used, for example, by Outlook or another e-mail client.

You should be careful when using this calendar.

4. Shared calendar in SharePoint

SharePoint is in short a file / information sharing point in Office365. Using SharePoint, we can create a website for the team, place notes, files, information there. We can also separate part of our Microsoft cloud into containers and send them to people outside our organization, in accordance with the GDPR / GDPR and preventing violation of our organization's security rules.

In SharePoint, apart from the above, we can also create (another) calendar. Its usability is unfortunately limited, because at the moment, despite many efforts, I haven't managed to use it in a meaningful way for management by team members.

I hope that the above entry will allow you to make a decision regarding the choice of technology to support our calendar - I tried to provide a dose of the most practical knowledge on this topic.