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How to configure calendar sharing in Exchange

How to configure calendar sharing in Exchange


Introduction

In a context where organizations are collaborating more closely, it’s not uncommon for users within one organization to need to efficiently schedule meetings by accessing the calendar availability of resources (users and/or meeting rooms) in another organization. Exchange Online’s cross-tenant calendar sharing feature addresses this need precisely. With this approach, businesses can improve meeting coordination without exposing sensitive user data.


Prerequisites

Administrator role

  • An account with the Global Administrator or Exchange Administrator role to access the Exchange Admin Center.

Step 1 : Sign in to the Exchange Admin Center

Sign in to the Microsoft Purview Portal by opening your web browser to https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com.


Step 2 : Activate the organization relationship on tenant A

In the left menu, click Organization, then Sharing.

Click Add organization relationship, and enter the policy name and the domain with which you want to activate sharing.

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Choose the sharing options. Here we have the default configuration.

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You can also create the organizational relationship using the following PowerShell commands :

Connect-ExchangeOnline

New-OrganizationRelationship -Name "RelationshipWithMaxime" -DomainNames "hiez.ca" -FreeBusyAccessEnabled $true -FreeBusyAccessLevel AvailabilityOnly -TargetApplicationUri outlook.com -TargetAutodiscoverEpr https://autodiscover-s.outlook.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.svc/WSSecurity 

Step 3 : Activate the organization relationship on tenant B

The same configuration must be performed in the second tenant, targeting the other domain via the web interface or the following PowerShell command:

New-OrganizationRelationship -Name "RelationshipWithOtherDomain" -DomainNames "otherdomain.ca" -FreeBusyAccessEnabled $true -FreeBusyAccessLevel AvailabilityOnly -TargetApplicationUri outlook.com -TargetAutodiscoverEpr https://autodiscover-s.outlook.com/autodiscover/autodiscover.svc/WSSecurity 

Step 4 : Validate the organizational relationship

The following PowerShell command allows you to validate that the configured organizational relationship meets the requirements.

Get-OrganizationRelationship | Fl

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Step 5 : Test Free/Busy in Outlook

After a few minutes, users can create a new meeting in their Outlook calendar and add participants from the other organization to view their availability.

In my example, I created a Teams meeting from the calendar of the user User@otherdomain.ca and added two external users. We can see that the availability of User.3@hiez.ca is visible, but not that of User@domain.com, a domain for which I haven’t created an organizational relationship.

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What if I have a hybrid Exchange configuration?

If you are trying to configure an organizational relationship between a Microsoft 365 tenant and another organization with a hybrid configuration (Exchange Online + on-premises Exchange server), you must add the mail.onmicrosoft.com domain address of the on-premises Exchange server to the organizational relationship of the non-hybrid tenant. Without this, users will not be able to view calendar availability information.


Conclusion

Implementing calendar availability sharing is a great option for organizations with simple collaboration needs across other Microsoft 365 environments. This feature simplifies meeting scheduling and improves collaboration between users. However, this approach is just a first step toward deeper integration. When two organizations have more complex needs (B2B Collaboration), the Multi-Tenant Organization (MTO) concept goes far beyond simple availability sharing : access to resources between tenants, a unified experience, and more. We will explore this option in a future article.

You now know how to configure calendar sharing in Exchange Online.


Sources

Microsoft Learn - New-OrganizationRelationship


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