Method for Sharing Calendars in Office 365 on Native Mac and iOS Clients

I have been working on trying to figure out how to use Office 365 to share calendars on the Mac and iOS properly without having to use the Outlook app. I was finally able to do it and now I'd like to share that process with the internet in the hope it helps someone.

Here we go.

Part 1:

CREATING THE COMMON USER:

The common user has typically been companyinitials@domainname.com for our organizations. This user is nothing special…just a fully licensed user with normal permissions. It can even have two factor enabled to further protect the user. This will be the user that holds all of the shared calendars. 

Log into the common user at portal.office.com and click on the Outlook web app. You’ll need to enter the “new” outlook mode by clicking here:

Once you have done that go to the calendar function:

Once you are there you will see the default calendar which is called “Calendar”:

From there, next to the default Calendar you’ll see three little dots which allow you to enter more options, click that and select Sharing and Permissions. 

Set the permissions for People in my Organization so that they “Can Edit”. Note: Now when I did this I actually got an error that said “The sharing invitation couldn’t be updated. Please try again.” After a long call with O365 support apparently this issue was related to a problem in their back-end system that they couldn’t fix “immediately” and that they would “get back to me”. I was actually able to solve the problem using power shell. Those power shell commands in case you need them are as follows:

Running PowerShell as Administrator on a Windows Machine:

• $psversiontable
• Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
• install-module exotools
• import-module exotools
• connect-exchangeonline
• Get-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity user1@domain.com:\calendar <— This will show you the current permissions. Set the user1@domain.com to the common user account you are working with. 
• Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity user1@domain.com:\calendar -User Default -AccessRights Editor <— This will modify them…again change the common user account. 
• Get-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity user1@domain.com:\calendar <— To confirm the change went through. 

Once you have done this you can go back to the admin portal to confirm your changes have propagated there. They did instantly for me.