I have a client with a Mac who primarily works with Windows users. They all use Microsoft 365, including shared calendars and meeting invitations.
For years he has struggled with calendar interoperability issues — when he accepts an invitation, the organizer doesn’t see his response, and he can’t see when others accept his invites. He’s become ‘the difficult Mac guy’ in the group.
He recently bought a new MacBook Air and is currently using Apple Mail and Apple Calendar. Frustrated with the ongoing issues, he’s now considering switching to a PC.
My questions:
Would installing Microsoft 365 (Outlook) on his Mac solve these problems?
This user is non-technical and has zero tolerance for workarounds or manual fixes — it simply has to work.
Yes, I think that would likely solve the problems.
At least, I use Outlook for Mac (new version) in a corporate (higher education) environment of thousands of users, and have none of the problems you describe: it’s easy to see who has accepted my meeting invites, and vice versa. Incidentally, I work across Outlook calendar (which is baked into the Microsoft app, which ain’t pretty but does the job fine), but also Fantastical to monitor my own Google calendars alongside my Outlook calendars, and meeting acceptance data also pulls through there. I can accept meetings in Fantastical, too.
I can’t speak to using Apple Mail and Calendar, but would assume that switching to Outlook would relieve these issues.
Might be an issue with their Exchange server. I use Outlook for my work email/calendar, and I see my work calendar on Calendar.app with no issue, including who accepted/declined etc. We’re on M365 and not a legacy Exchange server.
When we were on a legacy Exchange server, I indeed had major issues with Calendar Sync/etc, similar to the issues your client has.
I’m not too keen on Mail.app with my exchange set up.
Exchange doesn’t work with other email providers. My university used to have Google for students and adjunct staff and Office365 for internal and it was a nightmare, calendar invites and even email attachments didn’t work between the two. We recently switched students/adjuncts to Office365 and it works perfectly…
No. IMO some email systems work better with Microsoft than others. Loopia.se says something about MS 365 but it doesn’t look like anything that will help. Sorry.
It would solve the calendar problem, but really, he should also install Teams and the other M365 apps. They work as designed on Mac too. I use many of the M365 apps on my iPad daily.
