Sharing your Outlook calendar

You can share your Outlook calendar with others. Never include confidential or personal information in your calendar or (as an attachment) to calendar appointments. Sometimes this information can still be viewed by others. 

This information can be viewed by: 

• People you have authorised to see something more than just whether or not you are available.
• People who are authorised by the person with whom you have made a calendar appointment to see more than the availability information.
• Persons who open your mail in another mail programme. 

Default setting: only availability 

By default, colleagues who use the Outlook calendar only see when you are available (busy/free). They can use this information to invite you to an appointment, for example. 

Granting someone else access to your calendar 

For privacy reasons, we recommend using the default setting where others only see when you are available. So leave this setting at ‘Can see when I am busy’. 

You can selectively grant more rights to certain people or groups, allowing them to see more details about your calendar appointments. 

Granting a colleague access to your calendar 

In the Outlook calendar, click ‘Share’. You come out to the ‘Calendar Properties’. The table that appears shows the ‘Name’ on the left and the ‘Access Level’ on the right. There are ‘Access Levels’ you can choose. That role determines how many rights you give someone. You can also immediately see exactly what those roles mean.  

In the ‘Calendar Properties’ window you can ‘Add...’ your colleagues and select which additional rights you want to give them regarding your calendar appointments.  

Granting a group of colleagues access to your calendar 

You can also grant a group of colleagues access to your calendar at once, a so-called calendar management group. To do this you first have to create a calendar management group for your department. This can be done by sending an e-mail to icthelpdesk [at] ru.nl. The advantage is that if the composition of such a group changes, only the calendar management group needs to be changed.  

Private  

Information marked as ‘Private’ in Outlook cannot be viewed by people who are not authorised to do so. In other mail programmes, this is sometimes possible to view.   

In Outlook, appointments that you mark as ‘Private’ can only be viewed by someone else if you explicitly set this up: successively click File - Account settings - Authorised access, select the person who is allowed to view the contents of your private items and tick ‘Authorised person can view my private items’.