Save time planning meetings - share your calendar externally

If you - like me - spend a great deal of your day doing calendar juggling, you might be interested in the Calendar Publishing feature in Office 365. There is a lot of time saved if your external contacts can check your calendar for available time slots before they go on and send you a meeting request.

Calendar Publishing is done from the Outlook Calendar in Exchange Online using the 'Publish This Calender To Internet' feature.

For newer Office 365 tenants this feature is enabled by default for all users in the tenant (the tenant admin can disable it or change default sharing policy if desired). For older tenants it is disabled and need to be enabled for all users by the tenant admin using Windows PowerShell.

Enabling the feature using PowerShell

Start Windows PowerShell (Run as Administrator) and go through these cmdlets:

  1. $cred = Get-Credential
  2. $s = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
  3. Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted
  4. $ImportResults = Import-PSSession $s
  5. Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy restricted
  6. Enable-OrganizationCustomization
  7. Set-SharingPolicy -Identity “default sharing policy” -Domains ”anonymous:calendarsharingfreebusysimple”
  8. Exit

A few notes on the cmdlets:

  • at step 1 provide your Office 365 (tenant admin) credentials at the username/password pop-up
  • at step 3 and 5 answer Y to the prompt
  • at step 6 just proceed to step 7 if you get an error saying that this is enabled already or 'This operation is not available in current service offer' (see this article)
  • at step 7 - if you want another default policy see the Domains parameter in this Set-SharingPolicy article

After completing the PowerShell commands you should now see the "Publish This Calendar to Internet..." command enabled in your Outlook calendar

Publish your calender

To start sharing your calendar you need to go through a couple of actions in your Outlook calendar:

  1. Go to the Outlook Calendar

  2. Click Share on the toolbar and then click Publish this calendar to the Internet to open the 'Calendar Publishing - Calendar' dialog

  3. If needed change the settings for Publishing Detail, Publishing interval and/or Access level (see this article for details)

  4. Click Start Publishing to generate the links needed for subscribing to and viewing your calendar in a web browser

  5. Click Save and close the dialog.

  6. At any time you can generate a mail with the above links (just click Send Links to This Calendar) and/or change the publishing settings using the Calendar/Share dialog

Enjoy

 

See also

  • You cannot turn on or turn off the calendar publishing feature in the Office 365 portal - link
  • Users can still share their calendars externally when calendar publishing is turned off in Office 365 - link