Best way for teams to share calendars in modern O365

Technology Microsoft
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We’re an O365 shop that makes heavy use of Teams, but we still like Outlook for calendars. We’re hybrid exchange, and our current method of common/shared calendars is to create a standalone mailbox and share the calendar (or the entire mailbox) with everyone who needs access.

I know we can create Sharepoint Online “Event Lists” that can by synced with Outlook on PC, but we use macOS and Windows, and we’re also leaning towards the web version of Outlook for some staff.

We also tried the new Teams “Channel Calendar” app and Outlook Groups calendars, but every event added automatically sends a meeting invite to everyone in the channel or group. That’s great if the calendar is only for meetings, but if it is to track vacations or license renewal deadlines, then it is pretty obnoxious to invite the whole team to every calendar item.

I have a feeling I’ll just stick with shared mailboxes, and maybe use the /calendar/{email@domain.tld}/view/month path for a website tab in Teams… the only downsides are it will show notifications when that mailbox receives emails and you can’t use it to invite the team for meetings.

I really think we’ll need a Channel or Group calendar for meetings and a separate Sharepoint event list for tracking non-meeting calendar items… It seems like making “invite the whole team to this meeting” thing a simple toggle on events would resolve a lot for my use case.

Do any of you use shared calendars in both Outlook and Teams for more than team meetings?

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You nailed it. In my personal opinion, shared mailboxes sharing the calendar out is currently still the best option.

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I had a meeting yesterday with someone and that’s what we wound up doing.

For some reason, adding the shared calendar to my outlook web access allowed me to add events that the other staff could see, but i couldn’t see events they made until I went straight to the shared mailbox and opened its calendar (via “open another mailbox” in OWA).

It worked fine for everyone using desktop Outlook, but not for any webmail or mobile outlook users.

I heard several people were having issues with shared accounts yesterday, so I’m chalking it up to that.

I also added the tab in Teams to the OWA shared mailbox’s calendar and the team we did that for loves it.

Thanks for confirming that this is still the best way, it does help a lot!

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Shared mailbox calendar… still the best process in that environment.