Combining folder types in Outlook Favorites

Question

One of my clients is a transportation company that has a long-standing problem of hundreds of thousands of "Hail Mary" emails going to too many people via distribution groups just because all those people may need to see them some day, but the vast majority are never read by anyone. We are beginning to push heavily the use of shared mailboxes (Office365 mail server, not on-premises) to alleviate the problem, since this will, among other benefits, allow users to reply from the shared address and contain entire threads in a single logical work area, ensuring that affected staff always have access and can monitor new items, but without the chaotic clutter of it all being mixed together in their own inboxes.

Of course, the default view of shared mailboxes in Folder view means that many users will find themselves having to scroll down just to see one or another shared mailbox, then have to the the Drafts, Journal, Notes, etc mixed in with that shared folder's Inbox.

The partial solution is Favorites: switch to Mail view, then add each required shared mailbox inbox to Favorites. That neatly gets all those inboxes up to the top where they can easily see that there are unread messages and, with one click and no scrolling or expanding, go to that inbox, while having their own inbox in or just below Favorites.

But some of these same users need to monitor not only mail inboxes but one or more calendars. Users have not fully grasped the advantage of shared folders but might forgive me if I could find a way to intersperse shared calendars within their Favorites view. Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

Hi @Brian Hart ,
According to your description, I understand that you would like to add a caledar in your Favorite line, is it right?
If so, please kindly understand that we could only add a folder such as Inbox or draft to favorite in Mail view, and the calendar could only display in Calendar view, so there may be no option to add a calendar to Favorite and display in Mail view(whatever it's your calendar or a shared calendar).

Actually, based on my test, the shared calendars would display under your calendar in Calendar view, and we could open multiple calendar at same time and manage which calendar would display via check or uncheck it like below.

Also, we could view multiple events from different caledars in a calendar via view in overlay mode. Hope these options could also help you manage the shared calendars in your Outlook.

If that's inavalid, I have also tried to find any solution about the related operation or workaround for your requirement, but in vain. If it is inconvenient for you and you really want such feature, it's suggested to vote this similar idea in our uservoice for Outlook, which is the official platform that Microsoft collect the suggestions on Outlook, it may increase the priority for our engineers to create a possible option or feature that can be included in the future updates of the program.

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Answer 2

You confirm what I already found: there is no way to mix folder types in Favorites, so, unlike in Folder view, when all folder types appear (but with no Favorites) users must switch from Mail to Calendar view in order to see Calendars. I was just hoping that someone had more information or some workaround.

Thanks for checking, though.