Connecting an Outlook or Microsoft 365 calendar

Updated

Outlook and Microsoft 365 can publish a calendar as an ICS link. Ourday follows that link and keeps your family’s week current without anyone retyping events. The bigger picture is at Connecting a calendar you already keep.

Do this in Outlook on the web, in a browser: outlook.office.com for a work or school account, outlook.live.com for a personal one.

  1. Click the gear icon in the top right.
  2. Go to Calendar, then Shared calendars.
  3. Under Publish a calendar, pick the calendar you want to connect.
  4. Choose what the link shares. Can view all details gives Ourday the full picture: titles, times, and places. Can view titles and locations holds back the descriptions. Can view when I’m busy shares only busy blocks, which still lets Ourday flag overlaps but nothing else.
  5. Select Publish, then copy the ICS link. It ends in .ics. The HTML link next to it is a web page for people, not the one Ourday needs.

Using a work or school account and don’t see a way to publish? Some organizations turn that off. Your IT folks would have to allow calendar publishing, or you can keep sending individual events the usual way.

Hand it to Ourday

Text the copied link to your family’s Ourday number, or email it to your family’s Ourday address. Ourday reads the calendar, tells you how many events it found, and asks what to call it and whose schedule it is. It then lays out how it set things up, and you can adjust anything by replying in plain words: who sees the details, whether the kids get it in their briefings, whether it should mark you as busy.

From then on, Ourday checks the link about every half hour. Same-day changes get a heads up; everything else shows up in the next Today.

A published calendar link lets whoever has it see whatever you chose to share in step 4. Send it straight to Ourday and nowhere else. If you ever unpublish and republish in Outlook, the link changes, so just send Ourday the new one and say it replaces the old.

That brings your calendar into Ourday. For the other direction, seeing Ourday’s events in your own calendar app, see See Ourday in your calendar.