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 they are a member of. In addition, each calendar could have its own set of tags. I.e. "Accounts Department" calendar could have tags set for Meeting, Payment Due, Contract End etc, and "Sales Department" could have tags on their calendar for Client Call-back, Sales Visit, Training etc.
This has all been done via Outlook Online (Tags still seem to work fine from Outlook 2016 / Outlook for Mac) so I assume this is an update issue.
However, this all disappeared over the past few days. If a user now goes into and existing entry in a shared calendar, the existing tag shows but there is no options to change it or remove it. If creating a new entry, the option just isn't there at all. It is only visible on user's personal calendars!
Is anyone else experiencing this, or have any suggestions of a work around?
Many thanks!
Andy
Like everyone else on here, I've been struggling with M365 unified groups, after promoting it within our company.
I'm the admin, and made myself a member of 8 groups. I'm the owner of none of them. In 4 groups I have the same issue as everyone else here in regards to the categories. In the other 4 groups, the categories work fine.
I have scripted all 8 groups to dump all attribute to an Excel file, sanitized it and uploaded it to ChatGPT for analysis. It found no pattern that would explain the differences.
On prem in Outlook 2019 and 2021 categories work flawlessly across all 8.
I started off by scripting the extraction of events from Exch 2016 public folder calendars via EWS, then importing them into their respective M365 Group calendars via Graph API. This included the categories.
On all 8 group calendars the categories imported correctly, but on the problematic 4, I'm unable to edit or create categories online. In the Outlook classic app, I'm able to change anything, and it is reflected online.
There is a kind of a workaround for this:
- Create an appointment in your personal calendar with the category you need.
- Then drag the appointment from your personal calendar to the group calendar. This works in the installed (classic) Outlook app where you can show 2 calendars side by side
- The appointment with the category is now copied to the group calendar.
- From there on you are able to edit or copy appointments with this category and they will keep the assigned category.
Downside: additional actions required and you can not edit the category for an appointment
The strange thing is that this shows that categories are available in group calenders... but you just can not edit or select them.This is the correct way to display Group Categories. You have the ability to manage them and choose specific colors.
- How did you get to that second screen shot?
- Mind boggling that this is STILL an issue. Editing categories in group mailboxes should be basic functionality. If anyone at Microsoft could provide an update that would be much appreciated.
It's implemented in VirtoCalendar. The release is coming in January 2024 (at least we planned). You can finally manage and use this simple and valuable feature for your groups.
- Hi SergiVirto, Its now April 2024 and it appears Microsoft has failed to regain basic calendar function over a 5 year time span. Can anyone explain this???
- After four years from the original posting and one year from the last reply, situation is still the same. No way to customise group calendar categories and opening the group calendar results in ErrorExplicitLogonAccessDenied.
Andy_J_R Late 2022 and looks like this is still an issue?? Has anyone else found a resolution? I have tried the suggested workaround but have the same issue quoted by the other users...
I was experiencing the same issue but may have found a workaround. When trying to open the shared mailbox via 'Open another account', the URL showed that the shared mailbox was John.Doe(at)company.com, since this is an email address on the mailbox. However, if I replaced the email address in the URL with the UPN (or the primarySMTPaddress) of the shared mailbox, then I was able to open the shared mailbox (https://outlook.office.com/mail/jdoe(at)company.com).
I would recommend checking this if you're still experiencing problems.
cleonard nope, unfortunately that just tells me "This username may be incorrect. Make sure you typed it correctly. Otherwise, contact your admin."
- 2022 and same issue still applies. Categories do not work on O365 group calendars.
You can actually create the calendar event and right click and categorize from there, but these are your already defined categories from your inbox, not a unique one for this group.I have the exact same issue, and still no solution from Microsoft. ErrorExplicitLogonAccessDenied whenever I try to read an email address that is created with a Microsoft Team. I am the owner of every single one of my Teams, and I was able to read every single one of these email addresses by going to OWA and choosing "Open another Mailbox".
Every single one in my entire organization is broken with ErrorExplicitLogonAccessDenied.
Almost a year now with no resolution? We need access to these email accounts! They are a critical part of our infrastructure!
Absolutely unacceptable.
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,
- Thank you for your reply Andy,
your workaround will help our client a lot,
Regards,
- Any update on this?
As a workaround you can create multiple calendar groups, one for each category, then overlay them. Takes some right-clicking for setup though.
jimbruno1222 this is the current solution my client is using, which is very difficult for them to maintain. This needs to be a simpler solution as a group calendar. The option of categorizing after saving the event is more accessible to them. This is the reason I just migrated their calendar system from what you've described into a single public group calendar.
Any updates on this at all? Would love to see them be able to categorize at creation, which is the obvious solution to this issue. I assume it is underway since I've been following this for some time and have seen several calendar updates recently.
Like everyone else, I find this unacceptable. I'm working to get my organization to adopt Teams - this broken feature isn't helping convince them! I don't care if I can't manage categories within Teams. I need the category names on the Team calendar to match the names on the Group Calendar. Is this really hard, Microsoft?
