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We have a single conference room that may need to be booked by multiple users.  According to https://help.calendly.com/hc/en-us/articles/12303248557719-How-to-schedule-with-conference-room, we decided to buy a paid seat on Calendly for the conference room.  

The calendar for the conference room also needs to be visible to everyone in our organization with the ability to manually add events.  We use Office 365 and created a Group called Conference Room that is accessible by everyone and has the email address conferenceroom@company.com.

We then created the Calendly user conferenceroom@company.com - but cannot figure out how to connect the Group calendar to this user in Calendly.  The Group has an email address but does not seem to have a separate Office 365 login, as it is accessed via the individual users’ accounts.  We need to link the Group calendar so Calendly can (1) check availability and (2) add events to the calendar.  

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!  Thank you!

Hi ​@Align - Thanks for reaching out on this!

I’ve talked with a few users who have run into this in the past, I’ll add some info below that can help you work this out! 

For context, We have seen users connect to shared mailbox calendars if:

  • the shared mailbox/resource calendar is shared with the user's main calendar account (Preferred)
  • they create a log in for the mailbox

I’ll add instructions below for either solution!

 

Share the calendar within Microsoft so it becomes a sub-calendar (preferred)

An Outlook admin can share the resource calendar with your main calendar account. The admin will want to share with full managing and editing permissions; Calendly can only access calendars with full read/write access.

By sharing this calendar with your main account, you'll have a centralized place to check for conflicts. You also won't need to set up a separate log in or password for the resource calendar, since you're connecting to Calendly through your main calendar.

Once connected, you'll see your main calendar with its shared calendars listed when you click "Edit" next to "Check for conflicts" on your Calendar Connections page.

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See the exact steps below to connect:

  1. Ensure that your Outlook/Exchange Administrator grants you full read/write permissions to the resource calendars you need to use. This article from Microsoft explains how to share calendars, with the appropriate permissions: Share an Outlook calendar with other people
  2. Add the relevant resource calendar(s) to your Outlook Calendar.
  3. On your Calendar Connection page, select the resource subcalendar in the "check for conflicts" section.


Create a log in for the mailbox/calendar

Alternatively, you can convert a shared mailbox into a stand-alone mailbox with login credentials. Your Outlook/Exchange Admin should have the option to set a password and log in to the resource account.

This is helpful if you want the resource to be its own Calendly user. You can add the resource calendar as its own calendar connection, and you can include this Calendly user on collective event types with you. Any bookings for this collective event will push to your calendar AND the resource calendar.

 

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions. :)

 


@David - thank you for the detailed response!  I have one additional feature I’d like to run by you in deciding between these choices: our team members will only need Calendly to check the conference room calendar availability and push events to the conference room calendar for certain events, not all events.  It seems the 2nd option (create a login for the mailbox/calendar) would be best in this scenario, to use on the collective events using the conference room, as this option would only check the conference room calendar availability and post events there on those collective events.  Is that correct?

Thank you!


Hi ​@Align - Yes that would be best in my book. Having it own login for the calendar would work more fluently with your setup.

Let me know if you have any other questions!


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