How To - Share Your Outlook Calendar Online (Productivity Tip)
Productivity Tip Series from Murray Gordon, Architect Evangelist at Microsoft.
Recently lots of folks have been asking me how I expose my calendar to folks on the Internet.
So I thought I would give everyone a little how to.
First you need to open outlook.
Then go to to the calendar view
Click the calendar you are trying to share
In this case it's just "Calendar"
Then you should click "Share My Calendar…"
This is how you share your calendar with someone you work with. This is NOT how you share your calendar on the internet.
In order to share you calendar on the Internet for all to see you need to click the "Publish My Calendar…" link, once you have selected the your calendar.
When the "Published Calendar Settings" shows up, you first need to select the "Time Span" for which you would like to share your calendar.
Second, select how much you want people to see. I only reveal my availability (Free, Busy, Tentative or Out of Office). For security reasons I don't want people to have visibility of my full calendar.
Third you need to select who you want to see the calendar. Since I'm only showing availability, I share it with everyone. You can pick and choose who to share with, but the person you share with will have to have a Windows Live ID, which adds some hoops for the end consumer of your calendar to jump through. It does work and works well.
Only downside with sharing your calendar, that I've found, is that you can't share your calendar multiple times to different audiences. For example, if you want to share "Availability Only" with everyone and "Full Visibility" with your wife, you cannot do it. You can create a second calendar and share it with different rights, but not the same one. That's the only real problem I've found.
Fourth and last step is to type in a description. I just used my name, but you can enter more keywords. This makes it easier for people to find you on Office Online.
Once you click ok, your calendar is published to Office Online
Next you want to click "Yes" to send out a sharing invitation to let people know about the calendar you published.
The key here is to copy the URL of the web cal. In my case the URL is "webcals://calendars.office.microsoft.com/pubcalstorage/dnn8ks6z422379/Murray_Gordon_Calendar.ics"
When you send this to someone, and they click on it (if they have outlook), your calendar will be available in their outlook as a shared calendar. You can even look at them side by side.
Now you can check out what times work for both yourself and the share calendar.
Now let's take it a step further and show you how to look at availability online without pulling a shared calendar into Outlook.
All you need to do is change the URL. The important part of the URL is the id, "dnn8ks6z422379/Murray_Gordon_Calendar.ics". By changing the URL a bit, you can view the online calendar that is available:
Complete with Day, Week and month view. You can also click the "Subscribe to Internet Calendar" link to download the webcal we looked at before "webcals://calendars.office.microsoft.com/pubcalstorage/dnn8ks6z422379/Murray_Gordon_Calendar.ics"
Once I have those two url's I just add them to my signature, so it's easier to line-up meetings with people.
Here's what my Signature looks like:
The first link hits the Office Online calendar. The second downloads the webcals to use in outlook.
That's all there is to it.
Hope this helps. You out as you try to coordinate meetings and phone calls. It's been a huge help to me.
Thanks for checking out this post,
Murray-
Murray Gordon ISV Architect Evangelist Microsoft Corporation
https://blogs.msdn.com/MurrayG
Keywords: "Share My Calendar...", "Publish My Calendar...", Outlook 2007.