The calendar sharing feature introduced in Outlook Web App 2010 (OWA) allows a user to grant access to their calendar to another user. To access the option, click on the Share option when in the Calendar and then on Share This Calendar. You’ll then be able to select the user(s) that you want to share your calendar with and define the level of information you want the recipient to be able to see in your calendar.
Creating a message to inform the recipient that you’d like to share your calendar
The recipients see a message as shown below. To access the calendar, they simply click on the Add This Calendar link. OWA will then add the calendar to the list of available calendars and the user can then access your calendar whenever they want by simply clicking on the calendar’s entry to instruct OWA to open it.
The message notifying the recipient that they can access your calendar
So good so far. The user will be able to see your calendar but they won’t be able to add anything to it or make a change to an existing appointment. In short, they are restricted to “Reviewer” access. You can confirm this by clicking on the Change Sharing Permissions option in the Share menu, when you’ll see something like the screen shot shown below. In this case, just one other user has access to the calendar and all they have is Reviewer access, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they won’t be able to add or edit items in the calendar.
Viewing sharing permissions for a calendar
Maybe reviewer access is all that’s needed. But there are instances where it’s good to be able to add or edit items in someone else’s calendar and the frustrating thing is that OWA doesn’t support any way to manipulate the permission granted on a calendar. However, this is possible through the Set-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet, which is the underlying command that manipulates folder permissions. The command that we need to run is:
Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity alias:\Calendar -User UsertoGetRights -AccessRights Editor
For example, if my alias is “TRedmond” and I want to grant access to the user “Redmond, Eoin”, the command is:
Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity TRedmond:\Calendar -User ‘Redmond, Eoin’ -AccessRights Editor
Note that you can’t run the Set-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet to alter a permission on a folder unless a permission has already been granted to the folder for the user. If you want to add Reviewer permission for someone who doesn’t already have access to a calendar, you have to run the Add-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet with a command like this:
Add-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity ‘TRedmond:\Calendar’ -User ‘Pelton, David’ -AccessRights Reviewer
To confirm that everything has gone to plan, we can use the Get-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet to validate the permissions on the folder.
Viewing mailbox permissions for the calendar folder
Here you can see that one user has Editor permission and another has the default Reviewer permission. If we checked using OWA’s Change Sharing Permissions option, we’d see something like the screen shot below. Note that you can’t use OWA to edit the permission anymore as the code doesn’t cope with Editor permission.
How OWA displays a user with Editor permission
Once a user has been granted Editor permission, they can edit or add items to a calendar. Note the “Notify” checkbox. If set, the user who owns the calendar will receive an “Appointment Created Notification” as a new message in their inbox to provide them with details of the new event.
Creating a new appointment in another user’s calendar
Calendaring sharing is a nice feature of OWA 2010. It’s just a pity that the developers left out the ability to grant editor access to a calendar – but now you know how to do it behind the scenes!
– Tony
Follow Tony @12Knocksinna
Read more information about the new features in Exchange 2010 and Outlook Web App 2010 in my Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out
Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog 
Hey, nice…probably ExFolders is using those cmdlets also behind the scenes…?
Nice to have “ugraded PFDAVAdmin” back for the bulk oprerations with GUI
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/12/04/453399.aspx
/jc
Does “Set-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet” also work for mailboxes not just calendars? We are migrating from GroupWise to Outlook and would like everyone to use OWA 2010 instead of the client. We have a small group of people needing the delegation features of the client who manage others calendars & mailboxes. I’ve been able to set the delegation features in the client for a manager and then use the calendar permissions properly for the delagatee. For the mailbox though I’m only seeing the “Inbox”, is there a way to also include permissions to the “Sent”.
Yes, the cmdlet works for any folder within user mailboxes. The calendar folder is just one folder. I haven’t played around with permissions for the Sent Items folder but you could try it out and see what happens…
This is great thank you! We just coverted several sites over to only OWA and was wondering how to do this. Great write up thank you!!
Hi, this is a great article! I wonder if you have a comdle that will tell me what or how many other folders does a certain user have access to? Let’s say an assistant has access to BOSS1’s Calendar, and 5 months later, the assistant is promoted and now he/she is giving access to BOSS2’s Calendar. In a comdlet i would like to query this list against the assistant’s account. I hope the question makes sense.
Hi Andres,
I’m not sure whether I fully understand the question. I think you want to scan mailboxes to discover what folders a specific user can access. If this is the case, then you might want to play with the Get-Mailbox cmdlet to assemble a set of mailboxes that meet your criteria (for example, all managers), and then pipe the set of mailboxes to the Get-MailboxFolderPermission folder to interrogate the permissions. My concern is that this kind of processing will take a long time…
TR
Where do I run the Set-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet?
You run Set-MailboxFolderPermission cmdlet from EMS.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123778.aspx
Tony,
Thank you.
Your explanation helped me identify one of my two calendar sharing issues with Exchange 2010.
The other issue that I have is sharing calendars from the 2010 Outlook client; we can share from 2010 OWA and the Outlook 2007 client, but we can not share a calendar from the Outlook 2010 client. Do you have any experience with this?
It doesn’t look like auto discovery or sharing policies are the issue.
You can share calendars with Outlook 2010. See http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/share-an-outlook-calendar-with-other-people-HA010354420.aspx
There’s a Share Calendar menu option in the Folder tab of Outlook’s calendar. Have a play with it…
Hello, thank you very much for this article. Apparently we experience an issus with shared calendar we haven’t found a solution for yet. Our users shared their calendar with others. And these other change something in these calendar some Owner receive the “Appointment Created Notification” and some don’t. Can you help me how this can happen
I just have to say thank you for how well you wrote these instructions. I have read a few articles on how to use this cmdlet. You were very clear and made it easy to follow. This part in particular is explained so well:
The command that we need to run is:
Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity alias:\Calendar -User UsertoGetRights -AccessRights Editor
For example, if my alias is “TRedmond” and I want to grant access to the user “Redmond, Eoin”, the command is:
Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity TRedmond:\Calendar -User ‘Redmond, Eoin’ -AccessRights Editor
Thank you again,
Matt
Mr. Redmond
While reading this I can’t help but notice that there is nothing different in your command to set user rights as reviewer than there are for editor. I would assume that the only difference SHOULD be that you change editor our for reviewer.
Just thought you might want to take a look at that.
Thanks
Thanks (BTW, Mr. Redmond is my father – I’m just plain Tony). It’s amazing that no one else ever mentioned this – I’ve fixed the problem and updated the text so that it has hyperlinks to the relevant commands in TechNet, so thanks again for enabling me to improve the content.
TR
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Hi Tony,
Thank you very much for some excellent advice. I’m a budding SBS Admin and am always looking out for “straight to the point” advice. This article hit the mark!!
All the best for 2013.
Phil
Can I use this to share my owa with gmail? IF so are the command similar?
Thanks
Thanks for this helpful article. After I added Add-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity ‘User1:\Calendar’ -User ‘User2’ -AccessRights Reviewer , I can see User2 ‘s calendar. But In scheduling assistant I only see free/busy status as blue block. Is there a parameter we can add to this command so that we see details along.
Hi Tony,
Great article about something we currently use in our organisation. However, we have migrated a number of users to our new Exchange 2013 server and the notify check box seems to be missing when users are creating\updating shared calendars in OWA 2013.
We have been searching the internet forums and Technet for a while now to try and find out if this functionality has been left out of OWA 2013 on purpose or if it is available but just hidden in some way. Unfortunately we have hit a dead end.
Do you have any knowledge on this at all?
Many thanks.
Lee.
I think this is one of the pieces of functionality that is still missing in OWA 2013. I need to check on this though…
Thanks for the prompt reply! 🙂
We have had to migrate the users back to Exchange\OWA 2010 for the time being as they need this functionality. Obviously this is hindering us from moving entirely to Exchange 2013.
Your help is very much appreciated.
Lee.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office-online-help/sharing-your-calendar-in-outlook-web-app-HA103842904.aspx (for Office 365, but it’s the same functionality) is the best description that I can locate that might provide an authoritative statement on the point. Have pinged some folks in MSFT to see if this is an omission or just badly documented (or hidden).
Hi Tony,
Did you ever get a response from MSFT?
Thanks.
Nope. Everyone is very preoccupied with MEC. Are you going to be there? If so, it’s a great place to get answers… (maybe costing a beer or two)
Thanks Tony,
I can’t see anything in there the clarifies it 100%, hopefully your pals in MFST can do that.
Lee.
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