Microsoft Outlook Integration – Overview and Functionality

The integration supports two synchronization directions.

TimeEdit → Microsoft 365

Reservations created or updated in TimeEdit are automatically synchronized to Outlook calendars.

Supported scenarios include:

• Room calendars
• Staff calendars
• Student calendars

Updates and cancellations are automatically reflected in Outlook.

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Microsoft 365 → TimeEdit

Room bookings created in Outlook can be synchronized into TimeEdit.

This synchronization mode is available for rooms only and is typically used when users book rooms directly through Outlook, in order to avoid double bookings.

Only confirmed Outlook bookings are imported into TimeEdit.

The integration uses a combination of continuous synchronization and scheduled full synchronization to keep TimeEdit and Microsoft 365 aligned.

Continuous Synchronisation

When a reservation or calendar event is created, updated, or cancelled, the integration automatically detects and processes the change.

This provides near real-time synchronization and ensures that updates are reflected quickly in both systems.

Full Synchronisation

In addition to continuous synchronization, the integration performs regular full synchronization cycles.

During a full synchronization, all reservations and events within the configured synchronization interval are reviewed and updated if required.

This process ensures that changes made to the synchronization configuration, such as updates to event titles, descriptions, locations, colors, or other sync settings, are applied to previously synchronized events.

The full synchronization also helps maintain consistency between TimeEdit and Microsoft 365 over time.

Administrators can configure how synchronized reservations appear in Outlook.

Available configuration options include:

• Event title (Subject)
• Event description
• Event location
• Event color

Information can be generated from reservation data, object data, and free-text values. Multiple alternatives can be configured for event titles to ensure meaningful information is always displayed.

The integration includes built-in monitoring tools for synchronization management.

Administrators can review:

• Event mappings between TimeEdit and Outlook
• Processing errors and warnings

These tools provide visibility into synchronization activity and simplify troubleshooting.

The integration uses Microsoft Graph and Microsoft Entra ID (Azure Active Directory) for authentication and communication.

Access is granted through a customer-owned Microsoft 365 application registration, allowing each organisation to maintain control of permissions and access management within its own Microsoft environment.

Communication between TimeEdit and Microsoft 365 is encrypted and uses Microsoft's standard authentication and security mechanisms.

The Microsoft Outlook Integration enables organisations to:

• Keep TimeEdit and Outlook calendars synchronized
• Reduce manual calendar administration
• Improve visibility of scheduling information
• Support room, staff, and student scheduling workflows
• Maintain consistent calendar information across systems

By connecting TimeEdit and Microsoft 365, organisations can provide users with up-to-date scheduling information while maintaining TimeEdit as the central scheduling platform.

Source of truth

Reservations should always be managed in the system where they were originally created. Changes made in the other system may be overwritten during synchronization.

Only confirmed Outlook events are synchronized

Only Outlook events with the status Confirmed are synchronized with TimeEdit. Tentative or draft events are not synchronized.

Student synchronization

To optimize synchronization performance, changes made by students in Outlook are synchronized back to TimeEdit during the nightly synchronization rather than continuously.

Alias email addresses

If room mailboxes are configured using alias email addresses in Microsoft 365, the User.Read.All application permission is required for the integration to resolve those aliases correctly. Without this permission, some booking scenarios involving room aliases may not function as expected.

Multiple room bookings

If a single Outlook event contains multiple rooms that are synchronized through the same sync configuration, TimeEdit creates a single reservation containing all of those rooms.

As a result, if one of the rooms cannot be synchronized (for example, because it is unavailable or cannot be created in TimeEdit), the entire reservation fails to synchronize. No rooms from that Outlook event will be imported into TimeEdit, even if the other rooms could have been synchronized successfully.

Outlook categories (colors)

TimeEdit supports assigning an Outlook category (color) through the synchronization settings. The configured category is applied to all reservations synchronized by that sync setting.

If a user manually changes the category of a synchronized reservation in Outlook, the change will not be preserved. Shortly, the category is updated to match the value configured in the synchronization settings.

Currently, categories cannot be configured per individual reservation or reservation type.

Changes affecting the synchronization scope - such as updates to user email addresses, group memberships, or category values used for filtering - require the synchronization settings to be saved again before the changes take effect.