Exchange is a platform that handles emails and calendars as we all know, however, Some people wish to make appointments, private, and that means other people can’t see them, Or more specifically they can see the appointment, but the appointment just says private.
This is very helpful from a privacy point of view but not when you have PAs or personal assistance that need to manage your calendar and they confronted with a C of private appointments and they don’t know what they’re all about.
View Current Permissions
If you wish to view the current permissions you can run this:
Get-MailboxFolderPermission chief.bear@severntrent.co.uk:\Calendar
This will either return the default for my example which is this, this tells us that everyone as "Availability Information" only:
However you may see more people here with certain permissions like this, where we have a couple of Editors with a Delegate mixed in there:
Grant SharingPermissionFlags to the relevant user
If you are approved to access private appointments there is a flag you can set when a signing permissions that will give you access to these private appointments like they are normal appointment, this is done with this command:
Set-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity chief.bear:\Calandar -User subordinate.user -Access Editor -SharingPermissionFlags Delegate,CanViewPrivateItems
Then when you run the command:
Get-MailboxFolderPermission chief.bear@severntrent.co.uk:\Calendar
You should see you user added that has the Private items flag as below:
Permissions are valid, but it still not working - in Outlook
However, you may get people saying they are unable to view private appointments in Outlook, but they are able to view them in the web version of Outlook, commonly known as OWA (Outlook Web Access)
This indicates there is a problem with the Outlook copy of the data, as the website does not honor local cached data you are talking directly to the database.
Consider for a moment!
So if we consider the situation where chief.bear Has the calendar with all the private appointments and subordinate.user is the person that is unable to see these private appointments in Outlook, But can absolutely see those appointments in Outlook web access
Fix with PowerShell for Exchange Online
Well if you are using Exchange Online then you need to issue this command from EXO PowerShell to the "faulty" calendar with the -ResetDelegateUserCollection option as below:
Remove-MailboxFolderPermission chief.bear@severntrent.co.uk:\Calendar -ResetDelegateUserCollection
That should look like this:
Then confirm that "Sharing Permissions" have been removed with this command:
Get-MailboxFolderPermission chief.bear@severntrent.co.uk:\Calendar
Then you need to add the permission back with this command:
Set-MailboxFolderPermission chief.bear:\Calendar -User "subordinate.user" -SharingPermissionFlags Delegate, CanViewPrivateItems -AccessRights Editor
Then confirm the permission is re-applied and you should be all good from here, as you can see below the permission is back for the users that required it:
This will then fix the issue with the private calendars, yayyyy