Configuring Office 365 Calendar Integrations

Background

Together Platform is a web application for businesses to run internal mentoring programs for employees. By integrating with Office 365, you give your users several user experience improvements when managing their participation in the mentoring program:

• Users can see free/busy slots for their pairing, so they can book mentoring sessions at the right times

• Users can see the RSVP of their pairing to mentorship sessions because the user is the organizer of their own event

• Users can add a Teams or Skype link automatically to mentorship meetings

• Users can reschedule/cancel directly from Outlook

Important: if you are using an on-premise configuration or hybrid cloud, you cannot integrate with Together Platform. We support fully cloud Office 365 deployments only.

Installation

Step 1: Ensure Integrated Apps are Enabled

1. Visit https://admin.microsoft.com

2. Head to Services & Add-Ins

3. Find Integrated Apps

4. Ensure Integrated Apps are enabled.

Step 2: Authorize the Integration

1. Ensure you have access as an Admin to your organization's Together instance. To confirm, head to this page and verify you can sign in and see the list of eligible integrations within the Settings tab:

2. From your integrations page, click on the Set Up button beside the Calendar Integration:

3. Next you will be presented with 4 steps:

• First, select your vendor, in this case, please select "Outlook 365"

  • You will also see an option to enter an Integration Owner. You may enter an email to be notified in case the integration/connection fails at any point.

  • After filling out an integration owner, click the Continue button:

• Second, you will select your preferred integration method, for this guide, we will be sticking with the Domain-wide integration. Once selected, click Continue.
  • With the Domain-wide integration, you will be consenting to permissions on all user calendars at once. The domain-wide integration is recommended because it removes any user friction of having to personally install the integration when signing up for the mentoring program, and avoids a mixed experience where only one person out of two in a mentorship pairing has their calendar integrated.

• After you hit continue, you will be taken to the third step: authorizing the integration for your Microsoft domain. If you're not currently logged in with an O365 admin account, you will be prompted to log in.
  • Note: only admins with sufficient O365 privileges will be able to authorize this integration, so please ensure you log in to this page with the correct account.

• Once you have signed in as an admin, you will be presented with a page that looks a bit like this. Here you will be shown the permissions Together is requesting in order to facilitate the calendar integration for users on your domain. To authorize the integration, click Accept: 

• Now that you have authorized the integration for your domain, the final step is for Together to run a quick test on a sample of your users to ensure we can access their calendars properly. The test will begin immediately after authorizing the integration and once you have returned back to Together:

• Once the test is complete, you will be shown the number of users successfully accessed, and whether any calendar accounts were inaccessible. Once you've confirmed that the integration should be able to access all the relevant accounts, click the Done button:

• After clicking the Done button, you will see a confirmation that the integration is connected. If you need to edit the configuration or re-test the integration later on, you can do so by clicking either button here:

Step 3: Viewing/Managing Together’s Enterprise Permissions

1. Visit https://portal.azure.com/ as an administrator

2. Find the Azure Activity Directory button in the menu

3. Find the Enterprise Applications page:

4. Locate "Together Platform" in the list of apps. This will appear once you have consented as an administrator.

Permissions

Together's Office 365 app requires:

1. Read and Modify calendars

2. View basic user profiles

Data Usage

Only metadata of calendar events tied to mentoring sessions booked in Together Platform, such as event ID and start/end time is used. Together never uses integrations for purposes unrelated to mentoring sessions.

Further Information on Calendar Integrations

• It improves the user experience when users can sign in and are automatically integrated without having to fumble with accepting an integration. It also means the experience is consistent for all employees and they do not need two versions of documentation, should they want to read about booking time with a mentor or mentee.
• The app can be restricted to a security group or dynamic group/list in portal.azure.com if you want to decrease the scope. 
• We have SOC2 independent security audit and take credentials seriously, only ever using them for a signed-in user booking a mentorship session.
• Without the integration, you will not be the organizer of your mentoring sessions, meaning you cannot see RSVPs or manage the invite in Outlook.

Additional Resources

• Official documentation for an example Graph API endpoint Together uses is available here.
• For an overview of Together calendar integrations, please see our article here.

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