How to Create an Office 365 Shared Calendar

How to create an Office 365 Shared Calendar

This article will show you how to create an Office 365 shared calendar easily.

A shared calendar allows your coworkers to share appointments between team members, e.g., working on the same project or customer.

The basis of a shared calendar is a shared mailbox.

In hybrid Office 365, there are three options to set up a shared mailbox (shared calendar):

  1. Active Directory Users & Computers (with Easy365Manager).
  2. Exchange on-premises PowerShell Console.
  3. Exchange on-premises mailbox migration.

The first option is straightforward; you can do everything with AD Users & Computers with little to no training.

The two other options require working in many different interfaces and demand extensive training.

Let’s compare options 1 and 2:

Shared Mailbox creation / Shared calendar creation, hybrid Office 365
Click to enlarge

Let’s have a look in real-life at how option one is executed.

Create a Shared Calendar Using AD Users & Computers

The easiest way to create and manage shared calendars is using AD Users & Computers with the Easy365Manager plugin.

Easy365Manager is a plugin for Active Directory Users & Computers that adds two new tabs to user properties.

You can create the shared Office 365 mailbox directly from user properties in AD.

The following video illustrates creating an AD user from a template and creating the shared mailbox.

Everything is done inside AD Users & Computers. Even the delegation of send as and full access:

If you only want to delegate access to the calendar and not the entire mailbox, you can also do this with Easy365Manager:

Without Easy365Manager, calendar delegation is only possible using advanced PowerShell scripting.

Using Easy365Manager makes your Office 365 license and mailbox management an integrated part of daily AD management.

With Easy365Manager, you no longer need to switch to PowerShell or the many diverse web consoles such as Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Exchange Admin Center, or the Azure Portal. Instead, you can manage everything inside Active Directory Users & Computers.

Review the complete feature list to see if Easy365Manager fits your needs.

Easy365Manager is available as a free 30-day trial.

Download Easy365Manager now and start saving time in just a few minutes.

Create a Shared Calendar Using Exchange PowerShell

Without Easy365Manager, you’re left with navigating multiple interfaces, including PowerShell:

  1. You must first start AD Users & Computers to create the user account.
  2. Then you must connect to the Exchange on-premises management console and run the below PowerShell script to create the Office 365 shared mailbox.
  3. Then you must start a remote connection to your Azure AD Connect Server and run the below PowerShell script to synchronize the AD user and Azure AD user.
  4. Finally, you’ll need to log in to the Exchange Online admin center to delegate access to the shared mailbox.
  5. If you wish to delegate calendar permissions, you must log in to the EXO PowerShell module and run another set of scripts.

All of these steps can easily take 5 – 10 minutes, and it’s most likely not something you will trust your first-level support to do.

For reference, here are the scripts needed:

Create Office 365 shared mailbox for AD user:

Enable-RemoteMailbox -Shared "Sales CH" -RemoteRoutingAddress "sales.ch@azure.skrubbeltrang.com"

Synchronize AD with Azure AD:

Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Delta

Configure calendar delegation:

Add-MailboxFolderPermission sales.ch@azure.skrubbeltrang.com:\Calendar -User lene.hau@azure.skrubbeltrang.com -AccessRights Contributor