The company I work for was acquired by a large public company a few months back and my team has finally had to say goodbye to our G Suite products.
I am a longtime user of Fantastical and had m work Gsuite calendar in fantastical.
Now we are using Microsoft Office 365 / Outlook. While I am sure I’ll get use to outlook our company has pretty strict software policies and I can’t add the exchange calendar to Fantastical or really use any third party apps, using Okta for ID management. Even sharing the calendar in Outlook doesn’t work with emails not with the company domain.
Trying to come up with a decent workflow / workaround for getting my calendar events into my fantastical. I have a calendar In my personal google account that I am using for work events but right now I am just manually adding each event. Effective but I’m hoping there’s a better way.
Going to guess that you can’t add your O365 to iOS? We allow employees to add to iOS but not an app like Fantastical directly (if mobile profile installed). If you can do that, you can add local accounts to Fantastical. If you can’t, can you share your work cal with your personal gmail or iCloud account? (guessing that is also blocked)
I know it stinks, but I do like how Microsoft products really allow you to silo your work life into three apps on a personal devic. Outlook/Teams/Office
I’m in a similar situation. On the web version of outlook (which i can only get to using the Edge browser), i was able to get the subscription url that i feed into google calendar. It’s not perfect, but it worked.
Got into the same situation some years ago. I did come up with some hacks that kinda worked, but they were flakey and only ever one-directional.
In the end, I just live with it. My main criteria was that I wanted to see work and personal calendars in one place. That place is, unfortunately, Outlook.
Same boat here. I was briefly able to use PowerAutomate to “sync” to a secondary personal calendar in G-Suite but that loophole was closed. It also was hacky and not very reliable. Sadly I need to agree with @MitchWagner and just accept it so long as you work for that company. In my case, the restrictions are in place because I work for a very regulated company and they need to have really strong controls in place.
I did find (when my company didn’t block it…) that using the Calendar widget on my home screen was nice. It allowed me to a) see my next events and b) launch Outlook directly into the calendar section, bypassing the evil inbox.
I just started a new job Sept. 26. After several weeks, I sighed and let them install the mobile device management software on my personal iPhone, so that I could have my Microsoft Outlook and Teams in my pocket and on my Apple Watch.
To be clear, this was never a requirement. It was always my choice.
I looked into what the software will allow them to do, and saw one or two eyebrow-raisers, but the alternative–possibly missing a meeting or an important message–seemed worse.
Sadly, there is none. I duplicate the events manually, copy the Teams events on my Fantastical calendar. Or do what @MitchWagner did, have Outlook and Teams installed on your phone. Then run the Outlook calendar on your iPhone/Watch widget so you don’t miss anything.
Happy to know I am not the only one with this bugaboo. I think once I get in the habit of creating the events on the google cal it won’t bug me as much.
I find this state of affairs interesting. My company have locked out anything but official Microsoft apps from accessing our data, but on my unmanaged phone, I have Teams and Outlook running just fine.
Is there an even more hardcore setting that says even MS apps can’t access the data unless on a controlled device? That seems like overkill. Literally.
I can log into Fantastical using my organisational O365 account. But between an iPad, iPhone, Mac and work Windows machine I am forever needing to re-authenticate with a password and 2FA.
My only requirement is to see my work calendar alongside my personal calendars. Your calendar subscription URL trick works brilliantly to let me see my calendars without needing to constantly re-authenticate. Thank you.
Glad you found a solution! I am in a similar environment - I have to re-authenticate on a Mac, iPad, and iPhone every 2 weeks-ish. For me it is worth it to see calendar invitations immediately, but I understand the need for another solution. I have other reasons for needing another way to see my Outlook calendar, and I’ve used the below solutions, in case anyone else is looking for options. Note these are one-way solutions - they allow you to sync your Outlook calendar out, but you won’t be able to add appointments to your outlook calendar with these solutions. (I always do that by going into Outlook.)
As you mentioned, you can usually subscribe to your outlook calendar feed - on Office365, I found the URL at settings—> calendar—>shared calendars—>Publish a calendar.
I’ve subscribed to the calendar feed from Google Calendar and then used that if a GCal solution is needed. (I have a couple web services for which this is the only solution.) Google Calendar only refreshes approximately every 24 hours, and it is even difficult to force a manual refresh now. I’ve been using the GAS-ICS Sync script (a Google Apps script - GitHub - derekantrican/GAS-ICS-Sync: A Google Apps Script for syncing ICS/ICAL files faster than the current Google Calendar speed) instead to sync every 15 minutes and it is working splendidly. It took a work and faith to set up, but I’ve had no issues with any functioning calendar since. (I’m also using it to sync an Airtable calendar, and it is currently broken, but that is an Airtable problem.)
Hope this helps anyone looking for a solution. The script has been a game-changer for me, and it isn’t actually hard to set up.
I’m in a mixed overkill situation with our organization. Teams is totally fine on an unmanaged device, but Outlook requires a managed device. Our organization’s mail setup is not yet on M365, so that may be the difference (my mailbox is being migrated over the weekend, so we’ll see if that changes). I’m in an interesting situation as a result, where I have no access to email and don’t get meeting reminders on my phone, but I can see my calendar and schedule any meetings through Teams…
And the results are in. Complete access through any M365 app now, so I installed Outlook on my phone, iPad, and Mac. We will see if I regret this immediately or only after some time has passed.
