Whats the best way for a global shared calendar now?

[thecomputerguy]

I've tried public folders in the past, not great. I've tried a licensed mailbox, not great.

Is it a Teams group now in Outlook?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

In the old on-prem days of Exchange yeah I'd use a public folder.
Microsoft tried to make them go away, but they came back, you can still do them in 365.
HOWEVER...SOOOOOO much easier to do a shared mailbox.
I'll just call the mailbox by company name.
And from there, users can "pin" the calendar from that mailbox to their calendar view.
And..can also use that same mailbox for company contacts....it'll show up in Outlooks contacts as another contact source.

And you can add shared calendars in the Microsoft Outlook app on phones.

You can experiment around with 365 Groups, and Teams (they are similar, yet..different)....different purposes, they have their place, but...I still like shared mailboxes for centrally shared/accessed things.

 

[SAFCasper]

Of if you only want a shared calendar without access to an inbox, contacts, tasks etc you can use PowerShell to assign permissions on the calendar of a shared mailbox without giving users direct membership to the shared mailbox itself.

Add-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity sharedmailbox@company.com:\Calendar -User user1@company.com -AccessRights Editor

You can replace user1 with a security group to make future management easier.


Huge downside of this method is no AutoMapping. So users have to add the calendar to their view manually. Luckily it's quite easy as it will show in the global address list.

 

[thecomputerguy]

In the old on-prem days of Exchange yeah I'd use a public folder.
Microsoft tried to make them go away, but they came back, you can still do them in 365.
HOWEVER...SOOOOOO much easier to do a shared mailbox.
I'll just call the mailbox by company name.
And from there, users can "pin" the calendar from that mailbox to their calendar view.
And..can also use that same mailbox for company contacts....it'll show up in Outlooks contacts as another contact source.

And you can add shared calendars in the Microsoft Outlook app on phones.

You can experiment around with 365 Groups, and Teams (they are similar, yet..different)....different purposes, they have their place, but...I still like shared mailboxes for centrally shared/accessed things.

Ok so it looks like it's going to be a shared mailbox. I don't think the extra step @SAFCasper mentioned is necessary.

Is there a way when adding a shared mailbox to automatically add new team members and/or add all team members access to the shared mailbox/calendar?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

In the webUI, you can only add individual users to be members of a shared mailbox, groups like security groups do not show up to choose...when you click the + button to add members.

I have read something where you can create a mail enabled security group, and you can add them to a shared mailbox, via powershell I believe. But now you have to also manage/add members to that mail enabled security group. Perhaps there may be a way to have it auto add members based on some dynamic rule. Which...might make sense if you're an organization of say, over 50 or 75 users or larger. The vast majority of my clients are 'tween 10-say, 25 users, so it's not been worth the effort for me to chase that down.

 

[Sky-Knight]

A Team has a shared mailbox built in, and includes a calendar. So why wouldn't you just use a Team for this?

Shared Mailboxes are a solid answer too, but it's not the "Microsoft Preferred" practice, because maintaining membership of shared mailboxes is harder over time.

 

[thecomputerguy]

A Team has a shared mailbox built in, and includes a calendar. So why wouldn't you just use a Team for this?

Shared Mailboxes are a solid answer too, but it's not the "Microsoft Preferred" practice, because maintaining membership of shared mailboxes is harder over time.

How do I access this?

I have a very simple setup about 20 email accounts. I set all of this up from scratch so I'm very hands on in the tenant. There's 20 email accounts, I created a Public Team in M$ Teams, added all their previous data to the General channel for the team.

How do I use a calendar that is built into the team? I looked in the admin center unchecked this option, this then allowed the calendar to show up under "Shared Calendars"



But when I hit the checkbox next to the shared calendar it say's "could not be updated" maybe it just takes time? I just enabled it like 5 minutes ago.

 

[thecomputerguy]

I think I might have found it ... I don't think it's the checkbox that says "Don't show team email address in Outlook"

I think it's this powershell command ... after this command the user who was part of the team automatically joined the MC group, it appeared in groups in Outlook and now it appears as a calendar.

Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity MyTeam -HiddenFromExchangeClientsEnabled:$False

I'm going to re-check that box that says "Dont show team email address in Outlook" and see what happens for further testing. I think it might be unnecessary,

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Pros and Cons of each method, research each before diving in. For me, I lean towards shared mailbox for the purposes of...shared mailbox, shared calendar (like company calendar or vacation calendar), and shared contacts...although for contacts I also just have client use the contacts/groups in admin center too.

Depends on clients needs for the shared mailbox. Many of my clients like the centralized mailbox like info@, or sales@...which several people monitor. Just whip up the mailbox, add membership, and BOOM..it appears automatically in end users Outlook like a shared mailbox should. The calendar attached to it does the same..automatically.

Teams approach, you'll see where you manage the mailbox name, take time to do things to make it show up auto show up in Outlook..same with calendar. The way 365 groups works with the mailbox..it'll get chatty with other things too.

 

[alexsmith2709]

Depends on clients needs for the shared mailbox. Many of my clients like the centralized mailbox like info@, or sales@...which several people monitor. Just whip up the mailbox, add membership, and BOOM..it appears automatically in end users Outlook like a shared mailbox should. The calendar attached to it does the same..automatically.

Pretty sure this is how i did it a few months ago. They already had a shared info@ so i just used that

 

[thecomputerguy]

Pros and Cons of each method, research each before diving in. For me, I lean towards shared mailbox for the purposes of...shared mailbox, shared calendar (like company calendar or vacation calendar), and shared contacts...although for contacts I also just have client use the contacts/groups in admin center too.

Depends on clients needs for the shared mailbox. Many of my clients like the centralized mailbox like info@, or sales@...which several people monitor. Just whip up the mailbox, add membership, and BOOM..it appears automatically in end users Outlook like a shared mailbox should. The calendar attached to it does the same..automatically.

Teams approach, you'll see where you manage the mailbox name, take time to do things to make it show up auto show up in Outlook..same with calendar. The way 365 groups works with the mailbox..it'll get chatty with other things too.

Yeah but is there a way to auto add new members to the shared mailbox automatically ?

I see that as a huge plus for a Microsoft 365 Group especially for organizations that have rather high turnover. New users get automatically added to public teams which is amazing.

Having to manually go into EAC and add every new user manually and delete every old user manually seems ancient.

 

[thecomputerguy]

Or wait a minute, are you able to add the team as a member of the shared mailbox? Ultimately accomplishing the same thing?

I might have my verbiage wrong here, but by team I mean m365 group.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah but is there a way to auto add new members to the shared mailbox automatically ?

I see that as a huge plus for a Microsoft 365 Group especially for organizations that have rather high turnover. New users get automatically added to public teams which is amazing.

Having to manually go into EAC and add every new user manually and delete every old user manually seems ancient.

Not that I know of, as mentioned above, I just do it manually...because most of my clients are 10<==>50 size,...or for quite a few clients, the "person sorta IT-ish" at the client has user/exchange/helpdesk roles added to their 365 account so they can manage all of that.

I be ware of which type of Team you can create, and after the fact, what you can change it to.
Private...I usually use this.
Public...rarely use this..requires people to be aware of it and join themselves
Org-Wide...this maybe the type of team you're thinking of...each new licensed user you create gets auto added to this type. Has to be created this way from get go.. (last I knew).

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

*Before Teams....Microsoft created "365 Groups". It was a predecessor to a Team, had a mailbox, calendar, and a document library...amongst other little things.
*Microsoft later created Teams....which sorta of...crossed over with what 365 Groups did...but they had their differences. When you create a Team it does created a mailbox underneath, sorta like a 365 Group does, and of course it has its documents and other "Teams things"...and from what I've read, Microsoft was slowly to bring the two things together.

So...continuing this conversation...what did I notice today...that may be new, or..it may be a year or two or three old but I never noticed.
Today I stood up a new 365 tenant for a new electrician group client of mine. I get all the usual stuff set up, AzureAD join, as I add more "auto configure policies"...testing those and seeing how they work. I'm going down the home stretch and went to create my usual "shared mailbox" for a shared company calendar. I go to the users Outlook to add the shared mailbox to calendar view...and I see under "groups"...the name of the first Team I created. Whoa! And..I can add it to calendar view on the Outlook desktop app. And..I can add it to the Outlook app on an Android phone..just got to the calendar, options and put a check in next to it..it's already showing up there. It's bidirectional in usefulness, tested that...cool!

From what I recall, when you create a Team, it makes a mailbox..but that is "hidden". You "can" unhide it via a powershell command. But it's usually a goobledy gock name. Because a Teams sorta makes some components of a 365 group under the hood. But in the past, a Team never showed up as a calendar to add to my calendar view in Outlook!

So...either this feature got added a while ago and I never noticed...or it quietly got added recently. I do not see a mailbox show up by default, only the calendar. Probably can unhide the mailbox with powershell. But what I'm getting to, this may remove the need to create a shared mailbox for at least calendars.

Looking at existing and older 365 tenants (like our own at my office)....each of the Teams we have does not show up under "Groups" in Outlook. To be able to use as a calendar. Perhaps the feature may make itself available over time, or...back to old powershell to release that feature on existing tenants.