Calendar Publishing in Live@edu

So, you want to publish your calendar?

In my last post I talked about how you could set up sharing free/busy information between two Live@edu environments but what about sharing your whole calendar with someone? When you click share in the calendar screen, by default, the options to publish the calendar to the Internet are greyed out. In this post I’ll show you how you can enable that, and limit the ability to only a subset of your users.

The end result being that you could enable this feature for your staff, and not for your students. This would allow members of staff in different schools to share their calendars with each other but would keep student calendars private. Cool, eh?

 PowerShell

As with many of the advanced features of Live@edu, we turn to PowerShell to make this happen. You need to connect to your tenant as an administrator in order to perform these configuration changes. To find out more about connecting to your tenant, take a look at the guide on Outlook Live Help.

Once connected, you’ll need to run the following command:

Enable-OrganizationCustomization

This isn’t always necessary, but in the Microsoft datacentres, certain objects are consolidated to save space. When you try to use Windows PowerShell to modify one of these objects for the first time, you may encounter the error message that tells you to run the Enable-OrganizationCustomization cmdlet. More information is available in the corresponding tech article on Outlook Live Help.

New Sharing Policy

Next, we need to create a new sharing policy to use specifically with a different group of users. To create the new policy, run the following command:

New-SharingPolicy -Name "Calendar Sharing Policy" -Domains "anonymous:calendarsharingfreebusysimple"

This should return something similar to:

Apply to Users

Next step is to apply this to a user – to do this to an individual, you can do:

set-mailbox <mailbox> -SharingPolicy "Calendar Sharing Policy"

You can review the sharing policy for a mailbox:

get-mailbox <mailbox> | Select-Object SharingPolicy

If you log in to Outlook Live as one of the users you’ve applied the change to you should now see that you can change the publishing settings for the calendar:

By selecting “Publish This Calendar to Internet” you can alter the publishing settings:

It is possible to write a simple PowerShell script that will apply this sharing policy to a number of users, making it easy to roll this out to your staff but keeping student calendars private.