Calendar syncing - outlook Microsoft 365

Challenges
1

I could use some crowdsourced wisdom about a calendar sync problem I can’t yet solve.

I’m working inside an organization that uses Office 365 for their internal email/calendar management, I’m not actually employed by that organization, and I’ve always used google calendar instead to manage my personal calendars (I do have multiple google calendars in one account). In addition, part of my work schedule is dictated by a third-party scheduling application which provides a webcal subscription. I personally manage my many calendars in Fantastical.

I would like to be able to get these calendars into Outlook/365 so that people inside the organization can see my availability for scheduling meetings, but have a couple issues.

  1. I can integrate my google calendar into outlook/365 natively for free/busy purposes, but it will only use the primary calendar for a google account. I currently use 4 calendars in a single account, and I like to do that for color-coding. I could color-code each event manually, but I’d rather not.
  2. I can view my 3rd party webcal subscription in outlook/365, but I can’t seem to make it see that calendar for busy/free purposes.

Does anyone have a workaround for these issues? My first thought was to try to sync everything to one consolidated google calendar, but I can’t quite figure out how to do so. I need it to dynamically update as there are frequent changes. I have access to Zapier and would be willing to use other tools also.

The people inside my organization seem to be very confused by third-party scheduling tools like calendly, so I’d like to get the free/busy availability into the office 365 environment if possible.

Thanks!

2

Is that the only reason? If so, you may already know the simplest approach and auto colour coding I suspect might lose out to the practicality of data syncing between multiple platforms.

You may well find it easier to set up something to automate the colour coding of events in one Google calendar than to try to automate forcing four Google calendars into a feed for one Exchange calendar.

Microsoft Power Automate can get you so far on the latter, but things get sticky when things are removed or updated. I looked at it a few years back for a feed and it was just impractical to keep it current. It may be an option now, but I doubt it would be an ideal one. Especially since it sounds like you have a viable solution for one calendar already.

3

That’s a good idea to automate some of the color-coding. (Although for some reason I can only get black for a whole calendar and not for individual events, but I suppose I can change my color-code scheme.)

I do really need to figure out the WebCal subscription problem - I need both problems solved somehow for this to work.