Hybrid Calendar Service with Office 365 integration reference in webex

Summary

A collaboration experience that provides a seamless collaboration between Cisco Webex Meetings, the Webex App for Office 365, and Cisco Webex Meetings is provided through the Hybrid Calendar.

A number of major features are currently available as part of the integration:

The end user should be able to use any calendar application connecting to Office 365 to schedule a collaboration meeting without having to install any plug-ins or extensions to be able to schedule the meeting without being redirected to the Office 365 website. It is simple to create a meeting by sending a keyword (for example, @webex or @meet) into the Location field or putting a SIP URI or the address of the meeting into the Meeting Body field.
Users’ Webex Apps—on desktops, mobile devices, and hard endpoints—will be able to view a list of meetings.
OBTP, or One Button to Push, is a messaging tool that pops up a notification with a Join button.
In Office 365, a user can set up automatic replies for their Webex App presence (sometimes referred to as out-of-office status) by setting up automatic replies in Office 365.

An overview of the Hybrid Calendar Service, which integrates Office 365 and Webex into one cloud service, is provided in this article. The feature set for this hybrid calendar service is described here.

The following articles provide an overview of the other integrations supported by Hybrid Calendar Service in a similar way:

Referencing Cisco Webex Hybrid Calendar Service and Microsoft Exchange integration (for deployments of Cisco Webex Calendar Connectors that use Expressway)
Reference of Cisco Webex Hybrid Calendar Service integrating Google Calendar with Cisco Webex

You can find the latest information about the hybrid services calendar by visiting http://www.cisco.com/go/ hybrid-services-calendar.

Data handling

This hybrid calendar is connected to the office calendar system in which it receives meeting details and parses them to extract URIs and URLs that can be used to join meetings by parsing meeting location and meeting body details. It may also use other information, such as the meeting start time and the meeting end time, as well as the names of participants, for the purposes of populating the meeting list within the Webex App app and on some devices, in addition to providing One Button To Push (OBTP). A meeting description, a meeting body, or any sensitive data of invitees is never stored or sent by the service unencrypted, including the emails of those invited to the meeting. In order to provide the meetings list and OBTP, the full data of those meetings is sent encrypted to the Webex cloud (and stored there in encrypted form) in an encrypted format.

Exactly the same encryption technology is used by the Hybrid Calendar which is also used by the Webex App app to secure the data. So, in Hybrid Data Security, key management is either handled by the cloud Key Management Server (KMS) or by your own on-premise Key Management Server (KMS), depending on your choice to deploy Hybrid Data Security. The Security Paper for the Webex App can be found here for more information.

Office 365 tenant support

For Office 365 tenants, it is important to take note of the following considerations:

We offer our services for both single tenants of Microsoft 365 as well as companies with a large number of Webex users.
The Microsoft 365 instance for the Worldwide region is the only one we support. In addition to USGovDoD, USGovGCCHigh, China, and Germany, there are other instances for which we do not provide support.

The only instance of Office 365 that we support is the Worldwide instance. The USGovDoD, the USGovGCCHigh, Germany, and China are the other instances that are not supported by us.
There is no problem with your tenant(s) using Multi-Geo Capabilities in Microsoft 365 to store data in a selected geographic area, however Webex stores data in a location that is determined by the country in which the customer organization has its headquarters. Check out http://www.cisco.com/go/webex-teams-location for more information about this service.

Authentication and authorization during deployment

As part of Hybrid Calendar, users are granted access to their calendars within an organization by logging into their Microsoft Graph Accounts.

Depending on how the user wants Hybrid Calendar to access their calendar, there are two ways to provide authorization for it to do so. For Enterprise environments, it is the Global Admin who grants permission to the Hybrid Calendar in order to provide access to all users in the organization. The Global Administrator is the one who grants permissions to the Hybrid Calendar. Customers of enterprise customers are the only ones who have access to this method. In the second option, users are given the option of logging into their Microsoft 365 Calendars and authorizing Hybrid Calendar themselves. You will need to reauthorize your users periodically in order to continue to use Connect your Calendar. Every type of user can take advantage of this method.

Enterprise application authentication process

Hybrid Calendar is provided with the following permissions as part of provisioning:

Permission	Usage
All mailboxes have calendars that you can read and write on.	Adding the join details to the meeting text should be updated.
Check out the user profile by signing in.	Listed below are the permissions that are required for others. There is no direct connection between Hybrid Calendar and it.
The mailbox settings of all users can be read and written.	Identify the language of the user for purposes of localization. Read the out-of-office status. The status of out-of-office should be set (for future use.)
Read domains.	Read domains

It is only by having privileged access to the Control Hub that administrators can set up a customer’s Hybrid Calendar for that customer’s organization. Your users will need to be authenticated and have their consent granted by the admin of the Office 365 tenant to which their users belong as part of the provisioning process.

As a high-level overview, the flow consists of the following steps:

In order to setup the Hybrid Calendar with Office 365, the administrator must log into the Control Hub and start the setup process.
It will redirect the browser to the Office 365 cloud for authentication and consent in order to use the hybrid calendar feature.
Logging into Office 365 is the responsibility of the global administrator.

A general overview of the application permissions is displayed once the administrator has logged in (vendor name, necessary permissions, etc.).
A user’s calendar can only be accessed through the Hybrid Services application if the administrator grants access to the application.
A test email address can be entered by the administrator, and then permissions can be confirmed.
The administrator receives a status update once the results of the test have been received, indicating whether the test was successful or unsuccessful.

Enterprise provisioning process

User application authentication process

During the user provisioning process, the following permissions are granted to the Hybrid Calendar:

Permission	Usage
Calendars can be read and written.	Make sure that the join details are updated in the meeting text.
Offline access.	Provides Webex with a refresh token that limits the frequency at which end users can reauthorize within a 30 day period.
The mailbox settings of all users can be read and written.	Identify the language of the user for purposes of localization. You can read the status of our out of office employees. The status of out-of-office should be set (for future use.)
The user profile can be viewed by logging in.	The permissions listed below require this permission in order to function. Neither the Hybrid Calendar nor the Hybrid Calendar directly use it.

Hybrid Calendar in the Microsoft Azure portal

In the Azure Active Directory administrator center, under enterprise applications, you can see Hybrid Calendar in the list of applications that are available to your Office 365 tenant for the Enterprise once you have authorized Hybrid Calendar to access it.

In order to view the permissions that have been granted to the Webex Calendar Service, click on the service name, Webex Calendar Service, in the list below.

Limit the application scope to specific mailboxes

You will be asked to authorize all users within your organization when setting up the Hybrid Calendar in an enterprise environment. In Azure, you can limit the scope of a provision to a specific mailbox either before or after it has been created.

Limit the scope of the project by using There are several steps to restrict the scope of the Hybrid Calendar service before provisioning it. For example, you can refer to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/auth-limit-mailbox-access for more information.

Provisioning a hybrid calendar with API operations

In order to access Office 365 calendar events, Hybrid Calendar utilizes the Microsoft Graph API from the Microsoft Graph Viewer. A number of operations can be carried out with this API in relation to Office 365. It should be noted, however, that the Hybrid Calendar only uses a subset of commands that can be attributed to calendar applications.

Table 1. Operations currently used by Hybrid Calendar

Graph operation	Usage
POST /users/{id \| userPrincipalName}/calendar/events	Add an event or meeting to a user’s calendar.
GET /users/{id \| userPrincipalName}/events/{id}	Retrieve details about a single event in a user’s calendar.
GET /users/{id \| userPrincipalName}/calendar/events/{id}/instances? startDateTime={start_datetime}&endDateTime={end_datetime}	Get the occurrences of a recurring meeting for a specified time range.
GET /users/{id \| userPrincipalName}/calendar/events	Retrieve details about events in a user’s calendar folder.
POST /subscriptions	Subscribe for notifications on changes to a user’s calendar.
GET /users/{id\|userPrincipalName}/mailboxSettings	Get a user’s locale and out-of-office status.
DELETE /subscriptions/{id}	Unsubscribe from notifications on changes to a user’s calendar.
PATCH /users/{id \| userPrincipalName}/calendar/events/{id}	Update properties of calendar events (including join information and extended properties) in addition to other fields pertaining to the meeting.
POST /users/{id\|userPrincipalName}/calendar/getSchedule	Displays the user availability and free/busy status for a specified time range.
DELETE /users/{id \| userPrincipalName}/calendar/events/{id}	Deletes an event from a calendar.
POST /users/{id \| userPrincipalName}/calendar/events/{id}/{accept \| decline \| tentativelyAccept}	Allows the user to accept/decline/tentatively-accept the status for a meeting.

Go to top

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Cisco Webex hybrid calendar service?

The Cisco Webex Hybrid Calendar Service provides a rich collaboration experience between Webex Meetings and Webex App with Google’s G Suite Calendar, for users and rooms.

How do I sync my calendar with Webex?

Go to your profile picture and click Settings > Meetings > Connect a calendar. Click Choose a calendar, and select from: Microsoft 365. Google Calendar.

How do I sync my Outlook calendar with Cisco Webex?

If you have a free account and you have administrator rights on your computer, in Webex App, click your profile picture, go to Settings > General > Connect Webex to Microsoft Outlook and then click Ok.

How do I integrate Webex with Office 365?

Follow this directory: Start > Cisco Webex Meetings > Desktop App > Settings > Preferences. Open Calendar. Tick the Microsoft Outlook box, click Apply, and your Webex toolbar ribbon will be set.

How do I Schedule a shared calendar in Webex?

Type the name or email address of the host, click Open, and then select the host’s calendar. Select the host’s calendar and then choose from the following options: Schedule, manage, and start meetings for that host using Webex Scheduler. Schedule, manage, and start meetings for that host using Webex Productivity Tools.

How do I view other calendars in Webex?

How do I check if a calendar is available in Webex?

You can see someone’s availability information whenever you see their profile picture: when you send them messages, see them in a space, or search for them.

What are the benefits of Microsoft o365 integration with Webex?

Office 365 integrations

With our Microsoft 365 integrations, you can connect your calendar and files with Cisco Webex collaboration tools. The Enterprise Content Management integration with OneDrive and SharePoint allows you to view, edit and share files directly in Cisco Webex.