Calendar

What it is

Solidlio keeps a calendar of appointments, maintenance windows, project work, on-call shifts and time off, and synchronises each person’s own copy of it with their Microsoft 365 mailbox. This guide covers the calendar layer and the external calendar connection.

This guide is about the events themselves, who is invited to them, when people are free, and how all of that reaches Outlook.

Concepts

Event types and statuses

Statuses: SCHEDULED, CONFIRMED, IN_PROGRESS, COMPLETED, CANCELLED, NO_SHOW.

Attendee responses: NEEDS_ACTION, ACCEPTED, DECLINED, TENTATIVE.

Roles and permissions

The role order is platform administrator > MSP administrator > MSP technician > organization administrator > power user > CUSTOMER`.

Two rules are worth spelling out because they are easy to get backwards:

• Reads are not rank-gated. A client contact invited to a maintenance window can see it and decline it. What they can see is bounded by ownership and tenancy, not by seniority.
• MSP technician ranks above organization administrator, so a floor in the wrong place here would lock organization administrators out of their own settings.

You never see a colleague’s event titles in free/busy. Their blocks come back as “Busy”. Only your own calendar reveals real subjects, and never for events you marked private.

Walkthrough 1 — Connect your Microsoft 365 calendar

1. Open Settings → Calendar Sync (/msp/settings/calendar in the MSP portal, /org/settings/calendar in the organization portal). Customer-portal users go to Integrations → Personal Calendar (/user/integrations/calendar).
2. Select Connect Microsoft 365. You are sent to Microsoft to consent to offline_access, User.Read and Calendars.ReadWrite. Solidlio never asks for more than the one mailbox you sign in with.
3. Microsoft returns you to the same page. The Connection tile now reads Connected as your mailbox address.
4. Under Synced Calendar, choose which Outlook calendar to sync. Your default calendar is preselected. Read-only calendars can be chosen — nothing will be written back to them.
5. Select Settings to set direction, frequency and privacy:
   • Sync direction — Solidlio → Microsoft 365, Microsoft 365 → Solidlio, or two-way.
   • Frequency — real-time, every 15 / 30 minutes, hourly, every 6 hours, or manual only.
   • Include private events — off by default. When off, events you marked private are never pushed to Outlook.
   • Auto-accept invites — off by default. When on, each sync run marks your outstanding Solidlio invitations as accepted.
6. If you chose real-time, turn on Real-time Sync. This creates a Microsoft Graph change-notification subscription so edits made in Outlook reach Solidlio within seconds. Subscriptions expire after three days; Solidlio renews them hourly, so you do not have to.
7. Select Sync Now to run the first synchronisation immediately.

What each sync run does

• Pull (Microsoft 365 → Solidlio). Reads changes in the connected calendar from 30 days ago to 90 days ahead. New Outlook events appear in Solidlio; edited ones are updated; deleted or cancelled ones are marked CANCELLED rather than removed, so attendees, time entries and ticket links survive. Recurring Outlook meetings arrive as their individual occurrences inside that window. After the first run Solidlio stores a delta link and only asks Microsoft for what changed.
• Push (Solidlio → Microsoft 365). Sends events you organize inside the same window. New ones are created, edited ones are updated, and cancelled ones are deleted from Outlook. A recurring Solidlio series becomes a real Outlook series when its rule is one Outlook can express (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, with intervals, day-of-week, counts and end dates).
• Conflicts. When the same event changed on both sides since the last run, the side that changed most recently wins. If Solidlio’s copy was newer it is kept and pushed out, and the run reports it as a conflict resolved in Solidlio’s favour.

A run processes up to 200 of your events and follows up to 25 pages of Microsoft changes. If it runs out of room it says so, and the next run picks up where it stopped.

Walkthrough 2 — Read the sync history and fix a failure

1. On the Calendar Sync page, the Sync History card lists your recent runs with direction, status, counts and the time each finished.
2. A run is SUCCESS when nothing errored, PARTIAL when some events moved but at least one errored, and FAILED when nothing moved.
3. If the last run failed, a red banner at the top of the page shows the message Microsoft returned and how many runs in a row have failed.
4. The most common cause is an expired or revoked refresh token. The banner reads Microsoft rejected the stored refresh token. Reconnect your calendar. and syncing is switched off automatically. Select Disconnect, then Connect Microsoft 365 again.
5. A clean run clears the banner and resets the counter.

Walkthrough 3 — Invite people and track replies

1. Open an event (/msp/calendar/{id} or /org/calendar/{id}).
2. In the Attendees panel, select Add. Pick a colleague from the list, or type an external email address.
3. Everyone in Solidlio who is added receives an in-app notification. External addresses do not — they have no inbox in the product.
4. Each attendee answers for themselves with Yes / Maybe / No. Your own answer is the only one you can set.
5. As the organizer you can also record a reply that arrived by phone or email: the Yes / Maybe / No buttons beside each attendee write that person’s response. This is the only way an external attendee is ever marked as having answered.
6. The panel header counts accepted attendees against the total (“3/8 in”).
7. Mark an attendee Opt to make their attendance optional, or remove them entirely. Removing someone is not the same as their declining — declining keeps them on the list with a DECLINED response.

Walkthrough 4 — Find a time that works

1. In the event form (/msp/calendar/new, /org/calendar/new), add the people you want.
2. Check this time reports, per person, whether the entered slot clashes and with what. Only your own conflicts show real titles; everyone else’s read “Busy”.
3. Suggest times returns up to five ranked slots over the next fortnight that fit everyone. Suggestions are ranked in the organization’s own working timezone: mornings score highest, lunchtime lowest.
4. When exactly one person is selected, Show their day lists that person’s booked blocks for the day you are looking at.
5. Select a suggestion to apply it to the form.

If the organization has business hours configured, suggestions respect them — including which weekdays are worked and which dates are observed holidays — and they are evaluated in the organization’s declared timezone, not the server’s. Without configured hours, the fallback is 09:00–17:00 on weekdays.

Configuration

Per-person sync settings

Frequency 0 means real-time only (webhooks do the work); a negative value means manual only. The background sweep checks every five minutes, so that is the finest interval that has any effect.

Organization business hours

Free/busy and time suggestions read the organization’s configured BusinessHours and observed holidays when it keeps them. Hours are wall-clock times in a declared IANA timezone, so 09:00–17:00 America/Toronto stays 09:00–17:00 in Toronto across daylight-saving changes.

Plan tiers

The calendar, its events, attendees, reminders, availability engine and the per-person Microsoft 365 connection are not plan-gated. They are available on every tier.

The organization-wide Microsoft 365 hub is gated: connecting it requires a tier whose integration allowlist includes o365_email, which in the seeded catalog is MSP_ENTERPRISE and CUSTOMER_ENTERPRISE. That hub powers directory-wide free/busy lookup and email-to-ticket; it is not needed for personal calendar sync, which uses its own app registration.

Troubleshooting

Limits and known behaviour

• Microsoft 365 only. There is no Google Calendar, iCloud, CalDAV or ICS feed support. The Google Calendar tile on the sync page is marked Coming Soon and does nothing.
• One calendar per person. A connection syncs a single Outlook calendar.
• Your own events only. Sync covers events you organize. An event a colleague organized and invited you to stays in Solidlio; it is not written to your Outlook.
• Attendee lists are not mirrored. Solidlio does not add attendees to the Outlook copy, so connecting a calendar never causes Outlook to send meeting invitations. Attendees on an Outlook event are likewise not imported. Invitations and cancellations are delivered by Solidlio’s own notifications.
• Sync window. 30 days back and 90 days forward. Events outside that range are neither pushed nor pulled.
• Recurrence. Daily, weekly, monthly and yearly rules — with intervals, days of week, day of month, counts and end dates — become real Outlook series. Rules Outlook cannot express (hourly and finer, or unusual BYSETPOS values) are pushed as a single occurrence. In the other direction, an Outlook series arrives as its individual occurrences within the sync window rather than as one recurring event.
• Cancellations are not deletions. An event deleted in Outlook is marked CANCELLED in Solidlio so its attendee list, time entries and ticket links survive.
• Scheduling granularity. The background sweep runs every five minutes, so a frequency below that has no additional effect.
• SMS reminders have no transport. SMS is a selectable reminder method in the data model, but no SMS provider is integrated; those reminders are counted and skipped rather than being marked as delivered.
• Free/busy privacy. Colleagues’ event titles are never returned — their blocks read “Busy” — and private events are excluded from account-wide visibility entirely.

Data handling

• Disconnecting deletes the tokens, tells Microsoft to drop the change notification subscriptions, and clears the Outlook event mapping from your Solidlio events.
• A erasure request removes the calendar connection, its run history and its notification subscriptions, and detaches the erased person from the attendee rows they appear on.
• Every sync run is recorded: direction, status, counts created, updated and removed, error count, first and last timestamps.