I often come to the empeg board when I come across a "that can't be" problem. Tonight I have one.

I help administer the Office 365 accounts of a church. I only recently switched them over to it and it's been going well. But now they're asking for the ability to share their contacts and calendars, and I've spent the last hour trying to figure it out. From everything I can find, it is flat out impossible to access shared contacts and calendars on mobile devices. This is absurd to me.

I would assume that sharing contacts in a small business would be a no-brainer, and I'd expect to be able to do it on mobile devices as well, but apparently that's not the case. I'm hoping there's someone here who deals in Office 365 management (or knows someone who does) and can tell me what to do.

So far, the only solution I've come across is to create a new user (at an additional cost/month), and add that user to every mobile device of every user. This is annoying and inefficient, and I can see a lot of problems with it.

Does anyone know of an actual solution?

Yes Public Folders are not accessible and yes it's pretty rubbish. I wanted to have a shared contacts and shared calendar for the company. I think there's a way you can set up one account and share that contacts folder or a sub folder of contacts to everyone. Even then I'm not sure that will show up on mobile devices. Doesn't necessarily need to be a whole new one but that would be the cleanest way in case the user leaves.

I'll be interested to see if there's any real solution to this.

Does that kind of thing work on Google Docs?

Google is what we use for shared docs & calendar.

I'm not positive but I'm pretty sure it does. Unfortunately this organization couldn't get recognized as a non-profit so Google Docs was too expensive for them. Office 365 is offered through Tech Soup who did recognize the church as a non-profit, which got them the service for very little.


That's basically what I've been reading as the only solution. I'm not sure if the contacts will show up on mobile or not.

There's also a way to set up "public folders" inside a public mailbox. I've set up both but haven't created the contacts or calendar entries yet. It's the perfect way to do this sort of thing, because I can control permissions from the admin panel and it'll just show up on the appropriate users' systems... but... IT WON'T SHOW ON MOBILE! This is just stupid.

There's also the global address list, but as far as I can tell there's no way to edit that beyond adding and removing users from the organization.

Is this in the US? Does the church not have a 501c3 designation letter from the IRS? And if not in the US, it seems that Google also uses Tech Soup registration for eligibility requirements. I'm really curious how a church can't get recognized as a non-profit (unless it's the Scientologists).

When we went through this process initially it was a year or two ago, and they didn't do things through Tech Soup. They had their own in-house people doing it (or so it seemed from the outside). The church is a 501c3, but it's also part of a larger organization or something...I don't know, it was complicated, and for some reason they came back to us a week or so later and said they were rejecting the application, and I had no recourse. So when I saw that Office 365 was available through Tech Soup, I was thrilled! Tech Soup has their act together, and I got non-profit approval in less than a day.

So here's the follow-up:

IT'S NOT POSSIBLE.

I've spent at least 5-7 hours on the phone with 365 support at this point, and all we were doing was figuring out workarounds. There's certainly no straightforward solution.

This is infuriating. The fact that MS has neglected this is beyond reason. The ironic part to me is that within Outlook, this works really, really well. In the Exchange Admin panel I can create a shared mailbox and assign fine-grained permissions. Then each user can easily use File>Open>Other User's folder and enter the name of the shared mailbox and the type of folder they want to add. Then it can be manipulated just like any other calendar in Outlook. It works really well.

But you want to see that calendar on a mobile device? Sorry. Not going to happen.

I did find an extremely awkward workaround to view a shared calendar, but you had to go into the OWA portal, add the shared mailbox as a favorite in Mail, then add it as a calendar in the Calendar page, then download the [absolutely horrible] OWA app for iPhone or Android, enter your password into that app twice for some reason, and then you can view the shared calendar, but only in that OWA app and only separately from the others by swiping from the left and selecting it manually. Contacts from shared mailboxes do not show up at all on mobile in any form whatsoever. This wasn't an acceptable solution.

That's really odd. Maybe it's the fact that it's part of a larger organization that was the issue. Google's lack of transparency is really frustrating, sometimes. When I signed up my wife's theatre, all I had to do was send a copy of the 501c3 designation letter from IRS. We were accepted the next day. I wonder what would happen if you tried to apply again...