Tips for Working with Shared Calendar Events

You may have noticed several calendar event emails from Kelly last week to delete the ownership meeting … no wait, add it back … no, delete it 2 more times … no wait, add it back. Very confusing Kelly!

This really wasn’t Kelly’s fault. We have noticed quirky behavior like this often occurs when you try to edit or delete a calendar event from your phone that is shared between multiple people. When you update an event on your phone, it tries to keep that in-sync with your Exchange calendar. This is a fundamental problem with the way the iPhone communicates changes to shared calendar events with our Exchange server. It simply doesn’t give it enough details for it to handle updates to shared calendar events the way you might expect it to.

In this example, Kelly triggered this quirky behavior when he updated the shared “Ownership Meeting” calendar event on his phone and then his iPhone tried to sync that with his Exchange calendar. It thought it needed to send out changes to that event to the rest of the people involved, which in this case was “All Employees”. I also believe the multiple update emails that were sent were also related to this confusion between the iPhone & the Exchange server.

Unfortunately, my team isn't able to fix this issue. It is something that either Apple or Microsoft will need to address, and we don't have a lot of pull with either. Considering there isn't a lot of love between those guys ... I'm not expecting a fix anytime soon.

So my recommendation is simple: Don’t edit or delete shared calendar events from your iPhone, but instead wait until you get back to your computer and edit those in Outlook. If you must edit a shared calendar event from your iPhone, you could alternatively go to mail.betenbough.com in Safari and use the web-based interface to edit your calendar events similar to how you would do it in Outlook. By following either approach you will be editing the event directly on our Exchange Server and not through the built-in Calendar app on your iPhone, which should bypass the issue completely.

This only applies to events that have multiple people involved (i.e. you sent or received an invite for that event). You can tell if it is one of these types of events if there are other people listed in the "Invitees" section when you view the Event Details on your iPhone.