How to (one way) sync calendars between 'work' email account (exchange) and outlook.com\hotmail.com

Question

I have my work email account were I put most all my meets\appointments (including personal). What I would like to do is to do a regular one way sync'ing from work to my a personal email account (outlook.com). I just want to be able to view these from outlook.com or from Outlook itself (since I have that installed and configured to my outlook account).

I used to use Google Calendar Sync to push my calendar to my Gmail account. But support for Google Calendar Sync is going away ... and seemed odd that I would need to use something from Google to get to my Outlook meetings\apps.

Is there a way to do this? I have found some posts but some are old and link to software no longer available. Or some inelegant ways of doing this (fwd all meetings\app to other account).

Maybe I'm just missing the obvious(?).

Thanks, df

Solution 1

In order to do this, you need to be able to "publish" your calendar data to the web.

Naturally enough, most enterprises are "reluctant" to do this! As it leaks all kinds of information very easily.

To get round that problem, Microsoft allow the Free/Busy schedule to be published with a very limited amount of information in it. However, very few enterprises that I know of even publish that outside of their organisation. There are really good reasons not to leak the availability of corporate staff outside of the organisation so it is certainly a security risk.

What most people are now doing is to use mobile devices to aggregate their calendar and task information. On my iPhone and iPad for example, I aggregate calendars from Exchange (work, which has significant security specifications), my consultancy business, my personal calendar (Google), my wife's and childrens calendars (also Google) and some open Google calendars such as the school holiday calendar. I can turn them on or off as required.

So to directly answer your question, you will need to persuade your enterprise IT people to set up calendar publishing to the Internet using an iCal interface. This can then be added to your Google calendar.

Solution 2

If your work won't publish your calendar, then one possible solution is to export it as an iCal file and then place it somewhere which is accessible on the internet. For example, your own website or even a Dropbox folder.

Then in outlook.com add the URL to your calendar file as a new calendar subscription. Every time you update the file, outlook.com will pull in the updated entries and display them in your calendar.

Bear in mind that you'll need to manually update the file on a regular basis and that this may violate one or more of your corporate IT security policies!