Opening Office 365 Resource Calendars on iOS

     

Update: finally, Outlook mobile supports opening shared calendars directly.

Google it, everyone will tell you it’s not possible. It’s not supported. Yada-yada. The official Outlook client won’t let you add shared calendars, neither will the built-in Calendar app.

You can try OWA, but it’ll time out and ask for login within 6 hours. You then want to increase it, but 8 hours is the maximum. Then you may want to disable activity-based timeout, but guess what, it can only be disabled organization-wide, which is a BAD idea. So then you’re seemingly out of options.

Guess what, you aren’t. Here’s what you do to make it work.

  1. Open OWA and select Open another mailbox…
  2. Pick the resource calendar you need.
  3. Share the calendar – this is the tricky part. If you send it to an address inside your organization, it’ll not give you any ICS links. So you gotta send it to your private email address and then it’ll generate a long ICS URL which doesn’t require authentication.
  4. Now you can grab your iPad or iPhone and add this URL under Settings / Mail, Contacts, Calendars / Add Account / Other / Add Subscribed Calendar.
  5. Also make sure the data is updated periodically: Settings / Mail, Contacts, Calendars / Fetch New Data / Every 15 Minutes.

That’s it, cheers.

Now if only I could make the built-in Calendar app display work weeks instead of full weeks…