How to share your calendar with colleagues

1. Go to your calendar view. (If you have other calendars already available, make sure you highlight your own calendar. )

2. Choose Share calendar from the ribbon. It is in fact available on 2 tabs of the ribbon, on the Home tab (over on the right hand side of ribbon) and the Folder tab (in the middle of the ribbon as shown in the screenshot below).

3. A sharing request email appears. You can request permission to view recipient's calendar, choose how much access you would like the recipient to have (see below) and add in a message to the recipient as appropriate. If you wanted to share your calendar with a few colleagues, then you can add in multiple recipients in the To: field as you would in a normal email.

The drop-down menu options:

• Availability only - Appointments will be shown as Free, Busy, Tentative or Out of Office to the share recipient.
  
• Limited details - Shows availability (Free, Busy, etc) and the subject headers to each appointment will be visible to the share recipient.
  
• Full details - Shows availability and all details contained in the appointment (i.e. if an appointment has a message included, the share recipient will be able to open the appointment and read that message too).
  

4. Click Send.

Marking appointments as Private

Regardless of access given above, if an appointment is marked as 'Private' on your calendar, all the recipient will see is a 'Private appointment' label and a padlock symbol (see screenshot which shows a private appointment next to one not marked private as someone with full detail access will see them). Therefore all recipients of your share will not be able to open a Private appointment or see the subject headers - just whether that block of time is marked as Free, Busy, Tentative, or Out of Office.

Any item in your calendar can be marked as private and there are a number of ways

• mouse right-click on an appointment and choose Private from the menu that appears.
• highlight the appointment and click on the padlock symbol (top right of ribbon).
  
• open the appointment and click on the padlock symbol (top right of ribbon).
  
• if you are wanting to send a private appointment out, then click on the padlock symbol (top right of ribbon) before sending your appointment.
  

Clicking on the padlock symbol toggles the setting on and off, therefore to remove a Private setting, simply click on the padlock symbol of a highlighted/open appointment.

To change the permission level after the initial share

• Using the Share Calendar icon you can only grant read only / view permissions. If you need to grant others the right to create appointments they need to have 'Editor' rights granted.
• From within the calendar click on the Calendar Permissions icon in the share section of the top ribbon.
• The Calendar Properties screen appears (see screenshot).
• Click on the Permission tab.
• Select the person you wish to change the access.
• Click on the Permission Level drop-down menu and choose 'Editor' (if you want them to be able to create appointments) otherwise leave as 'Reviewer', check and amend other options, then click OK.
• The person you are sharing the calendar with may now need to re-add the calendar for changes to take effect.

Changing he default sharing rights

By default your calendars “Free/Busy” information is shared with everyone.

You can change this to “Free/Busy, Subject and Location” using the procedure above but selecting “Default” as the person you wish to change and 'FreeBusy Time, Subject, Location' from the Permission level drop-down.