Scheduling solutions

I guess a little background helps first: we’ve been using Outlook as our client for email/calendaring. We got complacent at $Old_Firm and used their mail server and the company assigned email accounts exclusively, which turned int a bit of a nightmare when we left, even though we were synching mail and calendar entries down to our laptops. Havening to update our contact email addresses with multiple business affiliates and professional associations is not an exercise we care to have to repeat. EVAR.

Now we have our own Office365 account for our business needs (halleluja!), which is a huge relief. We also recently signed up with $New_Firm, which is another huge relief. And turns out $New_Firm has their own corporate Office365, which they make available for all their agents. Okay, we can work with that. We’re using $Firm_email addresses for our clients and internal business communication, and our own business email addresses for other work related messaging. But DH is starting to pull his hair out over scheduling. Which means, of course, soon I will be doing the same.

He wants his Outlook calendar in our Office365 account to be his main, go to schedule. However, we still need to maintain the “corporate” one with $Firm’s Office365 (though the latter may not need to have ALL of the entries that are in the former). He’s been fiddling around with different apps for his Android phone, so I think what he’s looking for is some sort of third party whipped cream topping that he can plug things into and then zap them out to his Outlook calendars. Right now he’ll make an entry into one and then send an invite to the email address of the other. Or he’ll log out of one Office365 account and into the other. Seems like there should be a less clunky way of managing calendars across multiple MSO365 accounts, but we haven’t found it yet.

Granted, I’ve been too busy playing with all my Google apps to LOOK much… ;oP

Can’t Outlook be fed with multiple calendars from multiple user accounts? Or is that considered witchcraft in the business world? It’s been a long time since I used Windows habitually but at least on MacOS and several flavours of Linux, your active profiles don’t matter since your Calendar is capable of listing events from multiple profiles, user accounts, online accounts etc simultaneously.

Yep, and that’s what I’ve been playing with for my own use. I’ve sent and accepted share invitations between my own MSO365 account and my $Firm account, and so far it’s working well enough that I can keep myself reasonably on track. My next step - for my own masochistic reasons - will be to fiddle with sharing my calendar from my personal-no-work-related-crap-allowed-evar Google Apps account (I will not mention this part of my experimentation to DH. He feels Google is only slightly less evil than the IRS). It IS a bit clunky, but then MSO365 is clunky. I can’t complain toooo much at havening to deal with it. $Old_Firm had as their mail server an elderly Dell desktop crammed between dented file cabinets, running Outlook 2007. When it WAS running. :oP

DH has used Nitro before; think he’s playing with it again. Centralized calendar control from the smartphone appears to be his objective, and I’ll admit there I’m not much help as my go-to has been now for years a sturdy Day Planner. It never needs charging, is immune to malware, requires a refresh (in the form of new pages) only once a year, and is heavy and sturdy enough to double as an effective weapon. Which, in a business that includes meeting total strangers in empty buildings, is a nice plus. I do of course have a smartphone of my own, but I doubt I could take anyone out with it. :o)

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