Over 731,000 companies alone use Office suite software in the USA to maintain productivity in their businesses. Coming to India, more than 25 million people use Office 365 personal, which is a massive number. The Office 365 applications make the process easier with its advanced and user-friendly options to achieve tasks. 

Let us look at the Calendar sharing methods and how to create a shared calendar in Office 365. There are two ways to do calendar sharing, which I will explain in this article.

What is Calendar Sharing? 

A calendar or an event is shared with the team members in the organization to maintain schedules on time. There are many methods to share a calendar with the in-built Office 365 features. You can share your Microsoft 365 or Outlook.com calendar with the people inside and outside of the organization. If you have an Exchange, you can create a ‘shared calendar’, which you can share with the group or individual assigning necessary permissions and security. 

Let’s see how Office 365 helps in Calendar sharing. 

Microsoft business applications and its in-built options to improve team collaboration are simply superb. One of the Office 365 options to maintain team cooperation is Calendar sharing. With this, you can share invitations separately or with the group by creating a shared calendar. If you have a Microsoft 365 account or Outlook.com, you can easily do this. You can send a sharing invitation to the users, and it is displayed in their My Calendars list. 

Methods for Calendar sharing in Office 365. 

There are two methods to share a calendar in Office 365. The first one is through Outlook.com. You can access Outlook with your Microsoft account credentials and share a calendar directly with the person you want. The second one is creating a shared mailbox with access to the shared calendar. 

Uses of a ‘shared calendar’. 

Calendar sharing helps in developing cooperation in your organization. You can share a particular project/event invitation to the users in your organization instantly by creating a ‘shared mailbox’. You can limit the information access in the new (security group) group.  And this created shared calendar will display in all the Office 365 applications from the calendar to SharePoint. 

First, let us look at how to share a calendar in Outlook.  

1. Open the calendar using your Office 365 account credentials. You can go to the calendar by opening Outlook. Click on the calendar icon as shown below.
2. There will be a series of events under My calendars list. Select the event you want to share from the My calendars list.
3. After selecting the calendar, you want to share, open the sharing options by clicking the three dots next to the option chosen. Select the ‘Sharing and Permissions’ option.
   
4. A dialogue box will open, where you can select the person you want to share the calendar with by typing their email Id. You can share it with multiple team members by adding them one by one.
5. You can set up access for each person separately in order to maintain your privacy and only share the information you want to. With this option, you can decide what a person can do with your shared calendar. Click the share button after finishing the privacy setting options.
   
   
6. The selected people will display in the list below. You can change the access rights at any time and remove that person by clicking the delete option next to the email Id. 
7. Once you share the calendar with the selected person, that person will receive the email. They can accept your sharing invitation by clicking the ‘Add this calendar’ button.
   
8. The recipient can view the shared calendar by clicking the View calendar option. After selecting the view calendar option, remember they can only view the assigned information.
9. They can view your calendar in the Calendars list along with their other calendars. 

As I mentioned earlier, there is another option for calendar sharing. Look at the steps stated below to create a shared calendar in Office 365 so that the users you add to that group can access and respond to the email sent in the shared mailbox.  

Steps to create a ‘shared mailbox’ and a security group for the users in your organization. 

To create or set up a shared calendar for your organization, you must create a security group first, which includes the people you want to add to the shared calendar. Let’s have a look at how to create a security group. 

• You have to go to the Exchange admin center to create a security group for a shared mailbox. 
• Go to Admin and select the Exchange option. 
• Select New and add a group, which is your new Security group.
• Provide the necessary information for the Security group and click save. 

Now, we need to create a shared mailbox and access full permissions to the security group. 

There are two steps involved here. One is creating a shared mailbox, and the other is assigning the security group full access permission to the shared mailbox. 

• First, sign in to the Exchange admin center (EAC) using your Microsoft 365 credentials. 
• In the Exchange admin center, go to recipients and click the option shared. 
• Click the ‘+’ icon to add a new shared mailbox. 
• Provide a name and an email address to your new shared mailbox. Choose a user-friendly name so that it will be easy to remember.  
• In the next step, add users to the shared mailbox.  

Note: Here, instead of adding users one by one, if you wish to add in bulk, you can create a security group, following the steps mentioned above. In this way, it will be easy to manage the permissions for many users in the organization. 

• Click the save button to finish creating a shared mailbox. 
• The new shared mailbox will display in the shared list. You can edit its settings by double-clicking the option. 
• Ensure that the security group users have Full access permissions assigned to this mailbox by going into the mail delegation tab. 
• Click save after creating a mailbox.

 Instructions to use the shared calendar in ‘Outlook, web app’. 

To use a shared calendar in the Outlook web app, you need to open it from the directory. Follow the steps below to do that. 

1. Open Outlook and click the Calendar icon.
   
2. Select the Add calendar option.
   
3. After selecting the Add calendar option, click on Add from directory and search for the name of your shared mailbox.
4. After selecting the shared mailbox in the Add to section, choose the folder to add the calendar and click add.
5. The shared calendar will appear under the added list. You can check it when you open the calendar and click on the chosen folder. 

Would you like to advance your ‘Calendar Sharing’ features? 

Along with creating a shared calendar, you can also create additional calendar folders. You can create calendar folders for a specific project and share them with your team members by following the process mentioned above. The screenshots and options may look different according to the Office 365 suite, but the process is the same. Improve team collaboration in your organization by using the Office 365 calendar sharing options to build productivity.