Getting error: There was a problem connecting you to the shared calendar. Please ask the person who invited you to send another sharing invitation.

Question

We are getting the above response when users on Windows 10 PCs with Outlook version 2008 Build 13127.20408 click accept from an invitation to share a calendar is received.

We have tested the same share and accept on a MAC and iPhone, both work.

We have tested by accepting using Outlook on the Web and the above error does not present but the calendar does not show up in the list to view it.

Android phones do not present the option to open the xml in outlook to present the option to accept.

Our organization uses Office 365. No on-prem.

Answer 1

Hi anonymous user-4579,
Thanks for your update.
Just to confirm if I have misunderstood your issue, seems that you want to add other user's non-default Outlook calendar to your Outlook, right?
If so, this is limited by Outlook, just as the article you found mentions like below.

I did some research and found a possible workaround which might help you get other user's non-default Outlook calendar, I need some time to test about this and check if it could work. Any update, I will reply back soon.

How is it that MAC and iPhone can add these calendars?

This article could help you about how to achieve this in Outlook for Mac, please check the information in it: Open a shared Exchange calendar in Outlook 2016 for Mac.

Update：
Hi anonymous user-4579，
Thanks for your reply. Sorry for the delay.
I did lots of tests in different environment about your issue in the past few days. Firstly, I want to make an apology to you. According to my test results, it shows that the another possible workaround I mentioned above is only suitable in older versions of Outlook(Outlook 2016) and could not work fine in the new version of Outlook 365. Here is the reference thread.

Then I did the same tests in the same Outlook version as you and it could work fine in my environment. And test results show that the email invitation method is the only way to share non-default calendars in newer versions of Outlook. In addition, the sharing permission of the non-default calendar must be greater than or equal to the sharing permission of the default calendar so that it can be opened normally in Outlook for windows. So, please check those shared calendar permissions, try removing the old permissions and re-grant the highest permission to you and see if the problem can be resolved.

If the issue still continues, it is suggested to directly grant the shared permissions from the web mail(OWA) and also accept the invitation in your web mail to see if you could successfully open both the default calendar and non-default calendars.

Hope this can be helpful to you.

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Answer 2

Hi @JeffYang-MSFT ,
I completed additional testing of this issue. I believe you are correct that the invite must be accecpted in OWA. It can be sent from OWA or desktop. The calendar does not show up for me in OWA after I accept it but it does show up in desktop on windows. In order for that to work however, I must also add the account sharing the calendar with me to my desktop email accounts, which is not something we will have our users do as that would require sharing your account password with the person you want to share an additional calendar with.

What I can tell you is this works with Apple software, MAC and iPhone. AND after accepted on a MAC or iPhone the windows account can also see the calendar for that account.

I believe there is an issue with the Windows and Android software that does not allow this to work as expected.

We do not have a high need for this process to work. If our users report issues to us we will direct them to accept the invite using a MAC or iPhone and if they don't have access to those devices we will let them know that there is no way to make it work for them. It's something Microsoft should resolve at some point.

I am OK with no further research on this issue.

Thanks for your time.

Answer 3

Thanks for the Transport rule tip, that fix our issue.

In our case, we create an exception for the Transport rule where is not triggered if the subject of the email is "You're invited to share this calendar".

Answer 4

Microsoft provided the complete solution here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/hr-hr/exchange/troubleshoot/outlook-on-the-web-issues/cannot-open-calendar-from-sharing-invitation