Forum Discussion
Categories in Group Calendars
Hi all We use group/team site calendars heavily within our organisation and departments. Up until recently, users have been able to tag/categorise calendar entries within group calendars that the...
We are currently working in the following way for group calendar categories. This has been a good workaround for us, as it gives the exchange group owners the ability to set categories (from the group itself), and users the ability to select them.
Hopefully this is helpful to some of you - happy to explain in more detail if needed.
To create/edit Categories:
From your personal mailbox, click on your name/icon in the top right and select "Open another mailbox" and then type the address of the group that you want to set categories for. This should open in a new window. Clicking on Calendar and then creating a new appointment should give you the option to Edit/Create categories on the drop down list. These will then be replicated for shared users of the calendar
To assign a category to a calendar entry:
You can do this by either opening the calendar for that group in a dedicated window (above) or as a user who has shared Owner/Member access to that calendar/group.
As a user, from your personal calendar in outlook online, select the calendar that you want to edit from the list of groups in order to make it visible, and then go to add an appointment. You should be able to drop down the box to select the calendar that you want the appointment to be added to. Once that is selected, the categories made available to that group (above) should be visible and selectable. The New/Edit will probably be greyed out still (as you are a user, rather than accessing via the group)
Notes:
- The categories that you set are shared amongst the exchange group; the categories list will be the same for categorising a calendar appointment and/or and email.
- Screenshot is from the calendar when opening via an exchange group, rather than a user's calendar share.
- We mainly use Outlook Online
HelloAndy_J_R
We still have issue with your workaround, may i ask you a couples of questions about it?
To create/edit Categories:
From your personal mailbox, click on your name/icon in the top right and select "Open another mailbox" and then type the address of the group that you want to set categories for. This should open in a new window. Clicking on Calendar and then creating a new appointment should give you the option to Edit/Create categories on the drop down list. These will then be replicated for shared users of the calendar
When someone who is owner AND member of the M365 group, select "Open another mailbox" to edit the categories, we got an error with access denied
emsg: ErrorExplicitLogonAccessDenied
I would like to talk about this a little bit further if you are available.
Regards,
Hi KROSullivan and Mark_Laf
I have had a play with un-doing some of my permissions to see if I can get the same error message when trying to open a shared mailbox, but I can't seem to replicate it. It's not an error I have seen before.
On a general search, there seems to be some suggestions to try opening the new mailbox in a private browser (so I guess to force a new login) and see if that works (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/i-cannot-open-another-email-account-i-get-error/6ba4c8c2-7978-4a8b-93c7-b592a3473e3b)
Not sure if that will help or not!
In our case, this calendar 'workaround' works for my users who are members or owners of the Group that contains the mailbox and calendar etc - I have not set them any special permsisions for access into the mailbox.
Thanks.
Andy
Andy_J_R - Thank you for your efforts, I was sadly unsuccessful after trying the incognito login. Seems like from that thread Microsoft are working on a fix since August 21. We will see, thanks again.
