I need to access a shared Outlook/Office365 calendar (owned by one of my colleagues) on my iPhone, preferably through the native calendar app.

I've tried OWA client but the calendar interface is crap, is there a way of doing this without OWA?

Have you tried the iOS native Outlook app ?

(I don't know whether or not it can do those shared calendars and I know not every Exchange client app can access every flavour of Exchange shared calendars, I vaguely remember that the built in Calendar is limited in this area)

I have done this in two ways in the past:

- Way 1: Configure the iOS mail app and calendar apps to connect to your exchange server as well as your personal server. There are instructions on the web on how to do this. Then from that point on, you have two sets of emails and calendars inside your native iOS apps: Your work stuff and your personal stuff. At any time, You can view them both at the same time mixed together, or choose to view only one or the other of them.

- Way 2: Install the iOS version of Outlook (the actual app) on your iOS device. This is also what Andy suggested.


The former (integrating with iOS mail and Cal) works, but when I did it in the past, I would occasionally get problems such as:
- Not being properly notified when there was a password expiration, causing the synchronization to silently stop working altogether, so I would stop getting calendar updates but not realize it, and thus miss meetings and such.
- Bugs in their exchange support which caused synchronization to stop working and crash repeatedly in a rapid loop in the background invisibly, thus draining my phone battery unexpectedly.

The latter (just installing the Outlook app) is much more reliable, and you keep your iOS mail/calendar separate from your work mail/calendar. Though I cannot say if their calendar interface is any better. (Truth be told, I have not found a perfect calendar interface on a mobile device yet.)

The ios mail/calendar apps won't see the shared calendar.

There are two MS apps, Outlook and OWA. Outlook doesn't see the shared calendar, OWA will but alerts and interface are crap.

I tried a few different 3rd party apps but none of them are as clean and easy as the iOs native app.

I believe you, but it surprises me. You'd think they'd put that in there.

It's not a setting buried somewhere is it?

From hunting around on various forums it seems to be a common issue, I just can't believe there's not a solution.

I was hoping someone here had already experienced the issue so could tell me whether I'm searching in vain.

Can you use google calendar as an intermediary? I think it both syncs to outlook/365 and to native ios calendars.

-jk

Sorry I came to this late. Yes Tahir, that really is the situation with shared calendars in Office 365. They just don't have their act together yet.

In fact, I asked this question too!

I spent WAY more time on it than I should have, and came to a simple conclusion: it's not possible.

MS has done a lot of good things in recent years, but they're still making boneheaded decisions all over the place. At a surface level, everything looks good. But once you start the deep dive you realize how f'ed up things are.

I still tell many businesses to go with Office 365, but I make sure they know of the limitations (as I become aware of them myself). Sometimes it's the best option for what they want to do, but it's still annoying most of the time.

Sorry been really busy. Thanks Matt, I find it almost incomprehensible that two of the world's biggest software/OS vendors can't actually create an interface between them that works.

The same issues applied when I tried to get some types of Office/Exchange calendars working on Windows Phone, I think this one is on Microsoft to fix.

Wonder if there's any way to sync the shared calendar to mine...

I tried that once. Taking my work calendar, and using the Outlook settings to do a calendar sync to Google Calendar.

It was very problematic. It didn't sync at a useful frequency, so I'd miss meetings anyway. And then when the time came to change passwords, everything fell apart and I was getting weird error messages and it was hard to get things working again.

But...that's not possible in the first place, is it? Or was this back before they dropped support for that? Or were you using Google Apps?

The most success I've had with syncing calendars between platforms is with Outlook and GMail using the gsyncit tool. It's not free, but it works pretty well. I installed it for a client who checked her standard GMail account in Outlook and wanted her contacts and calendar to synchronize. It works pretty well, but she had to upgrade the tool and pay for a new version when her computer forced her to upgrade to Windows 10.

It was certainly years ago, and I don't remember the details. I didn't know support had been dropped for it.

To do it required jumping through some sort of weird hoops where I configured Outlook to sync to some sort of publicly-visible web calendar (it might have been an early version of what became Office365 later), and then I had to configure Google to "consume" that calendar.

It was really house-of-cards-y and I wasn't surprised when it fell down.