Who is this article for?
This article is for people who:
- have multiple Microsoft accounts and thus multiple Outlook calendars (e.g., one personal and one work calendar, or two work calendars with two different companies); and
- want their availability to always be the same across all the calendars. That is, when you are busy on the first calendar, you want the second calendar to automatically reflect that you are busy, without having to manually create entries on the second calendar.
Doesn’t Microsoft Provide a Way to Sync Two Outlook Calendars?
No. Microsoft does not provide any built-in way to make it such that availability is kept in sync between two Outlook calendars.
Adding multiple Microsoft accounts to Outlook allows you to see your multiple calendars in a single view, but those calendars remain entirely separate from each other. When someone (e.g., your coworkers) check your availability in the Outlook Scheduling Assistant, the availability they see will only reflect one of your calendars.
What if I subscribe to one Outlook calendar from the other?
In Outlook, when you click to “Add Calendar from Internet” or “Subscribe from web,” Outlook will add that calendar as a separate calendar. So in this respect, it is the same situation as above — it lets you see both calendars at once, but it does not affect your availability on either calendar. The two calendars remain completely separate.
(As an aside, the “subscribe from web” or “add from internet” option is actually much worse than directly adding your second Microsoft account to ==Outlook, because Outlook only updates subscribed every 24 to 48 hours. Because of this, “Add from Internet” or “Subscribe from Web” is really only useful for static calendars such as holidays.
“Subscribe from web” or “Add from Internet” are not helpful if you need to keep two Outlook calendars in sync.
Sync availability between your Outlook Calendars with CalendarBridge
CalendarBridge monitors your Outlook calendars and when an event is created or updated in one Outlook calendar, we automatically update your other Outlook calendar to make sure your availability is consistent between the two Outlook calendars. Updates propagate within a minute or two, not every 15 minutes or so like some other automation tools. You can also choose how much, or how little, information you want to sync between the two calendars Setup takes less than 5 minutes.