GPO to Automatically Connect SharePoint Calendars to Outlook

Question

Following up from an earlier question posted to the answers community.

Problem Our company needs a solution to manage several organization-wide calendars. We need to control permissions on these calendars based on individual users or groups of users. Permissions are relatively simple and match the SharePoint Owner / Member / Viewer default groups.

Potential Solutions / Research After reviewing potential solutions, it seems like SharePoint calendars would be a good fit for what we are trying to do.

The one limitation being that users have to manually connect SharePoint calendars to their Outlook. We've used SharePoint calendars before and found that users do not use them unless they can update/view them in Outlook.

I'd like to roll these calendars out to groups of user's automatically instead of training them to use "Connect to Outlook". I've done some initial research and can not find instructions on how to complete this task.

Question How can I set up a GPO to automatically connect SharePoint calendars to Outlook?

Additionally We are on O365 and SharePoint Online.

Answer 1

Here is an article with tutorial on configuring GPO for Outlook you can refer to: GPO to Automatically Connect SharePoint Calendars to Outlook.

1. Find the stssync URL Address for each SharePoint calendar by clicking on the "Connect to Outlook" button or using the PowerShell provided in the SpiceWorks post.
2. Add the stssync addresses into a group Group Policy for deployment via Group Policy Management Console > User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Office Outlook x > Account Settings > Default SharePoint lists.

The Group Policy Administrative Template files can be found via this link: Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) and Office Customization Tool for Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, Office 2019, and Office 2016.

Answer 2

@ChelseaWu-MSFT , I work with Brian and I am helping him with this project. I am trying to add the GPO but I do not see the "Microsoft Office Outlook x folder under my Active Directory Domain GPO. I have install the templates on my domain controllers like in the link you sent.

Answer 3

@ChelseaWu-MSFT

Can I create multiple Group Policies for each SharePoint Calendar I want to add? Meaning each Calendar has its own Group Policy Object so I can manage the delegation for each calendar. I am finding that in my testing you can only create one group policy object for all the SharePoint Calendars.