Create a sharing policy in Exchange Online

  • Article

Create a new Sharing Policy to change how people in your organization share calendars with individual business associates, friends, or family members. Sharing policies control how your users share their calendars with people outside your organization. By default, all users can invite anyone with an email address to view their calendar. After you create a new sharing policy, you have to apply that policy to mailboxes before it takes effect. To apply a specific sharing policy to users, see Apply a sharing policy to mailboxes in Exchange Online.

What do you need to know before you begin?

  • Estimated time to complete: 15 minutes.

  • You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure or procedures. To see what permissions you need, see the Permissions in Exchange Online topic.

  • Only Outlook 2010 or later and Outlook on the web (formerly known as Outlook Web App) users can create sharing invitations.

Use the Exchange admin center to create a sharing policy

  1. From the Microsoft 365 admin center dashboard, click Exchange.

  2. Click Organization > Sharing.

  3. In the list view, under Individual sharing, click Add individual sharing policy Add Icon..

  4. In the New individual sharing policy, type a friendly name for the sharing policy in the Policy name box and click Next.

  5. In the Add sharing rule, click Specify domain & share information Add Icon. to define the sharing rules for the policy.

  6. Select one of the following options to specify the domains you want to share with:

    • Sharing with all domains

    • Sharing with a specific domain

  7. If you select Sharing with a specific domain, type the name of the domain you want to share with. If you need to enter more than one domain for this sharing policy, save the settings for the first domain, then edit the sharing rules to add more domains.

  8. To specify the information that can be shared, click Share your calendar folder check box, and then select one of the following options:

    • Calendar free/busy information with time only

    • Calendar free/busy information with time, subject, and location

    • All calendar appointment information, including time, subject, location and title

  9. Click the Share your contact folder to share your contacts.

  10. In the Review and finish click Next to create the sharing policy.

Use Exchange Online PowerShell to create a sharing policy

  • This example creates the sharing policy Contoso. This policy allows users in the contoso.com domain to see your user's detailed calendar availability (free/busy) information. By default, this policy is enabled.

    New-SharingPolicy -Name "Contoso" -Domains 'contoso.com: CalendarSharingFreeBusyDetail'

  • This example creates the sharing policy ContosoWoodgrove for two different domains (contoso.com and woodgrovebank.com) with different sharing settings configured for each domain. The policy is disabled.

    New-SharingPolicy -Name "ContosoWoodgrove" -Domains 'contoso.com: CalendarSharingFreeBusySimple', 'woodgrovebank.com: CalendarSharingFreeBusyDetail' -Enabled $false

For detailed syntax and parameter information, see New-SharingPolicy.

How do you know this worked?

To verify that you have successfully created the sharing policy, run the following command to view the sharing policy information.

Get-SharingPolicy <policy name> | format-list