Sharing your Outlook calendar

You should never include confidential or personal information in your calendar or in your calendar appointment attachments. This information is sometimes visible to others.

This information can be viewed by the following people:

• Those to whom you have given permission to view information in addition to whether or not you are available.
• Those who have been given permission by the person with whom you have made an appointment to see more than the availability information.
• Those who open your email in another mail program.

Default settings Availability only

The default option specifies that any of your colleagues who use the Outlook calendar can only see when you are available (i.e., if you are busy/free/etc.). They can use this information, for example, to invite you to an appointment.

Granting another person access to your calendar
 

For privacy reasons, we strongly recommend that you use the default settings and selectively grant additional rights to certain people or groups, which will subsequently allow them to see more information about your calendar appointments. In any event, you should never include confidential information in your calendar.

There are several different levels for setting permissions. Please note: You can also customise your webmail (mail.ru.nl) accordingly, but the options here are somewhat more limited.

Granting a colleague access to your calendar

To grant a colleague access to your calendar, go to the Outlook calendar and click ‘Calendar Permissions’ and then click the ‘Permissions’ tab. You will now see a table; ‘Name’ should appear on the right and ‘Access Level’ should appear on the left. Selecting a role from the ‘Access Level’ will determine how many permissions you grant your colleague. In the same screen under ‘Authorisation Level’, you will also be able to see what these roles entail (and you will also be able to make changes). The role of ‘Editor’ (who is someone who can read the entries in your calendar and add entries to your calendar) is often reserved for secretarial office staff.

Granting a group of colleagues access to your calendar

You can also grant a group of colleagues simultaneous access to your calendar; this is known as a calendar group. This type of calendar group will first need to be created for the department (this is often done by someone from the secretarial office staff). This can be achieved by sending an email to icthelpdesk [at] ru.nl. The advantage here is that if the composition of such a group changes, it is only the calendar group that will need to be modified. This modification can be directly carried out in the Outlook Address Book and those people (the administrators) who are appointed will be able to make changes to the calendar group.

Private

Although information that is marked ‘Private’ in Outlook cannot be viewed by people who have not been permitted to view this information, it is possible that this information will be visible in other mail programmes. For this reason, you should not include any confidential or personal information here.

Any appointments in Outlook that are marked as ‘Private’ can only be viewed by someone else if this has been explicitly set up in the following way: Click File – Account Settings – Delegate Access, select the person who is allowed to view the contents of your private items, and then select ‘Delegate can view my private items’.