How can I move all of my appointments to a co-worker's Outlook calendar?

April 24, 2024 10:21 AM

I am leaving my job as a secretary to the Chair of an academic department. I have sent out calendar invites that go into the future and am hoping there's an easy way to transfer all of those onto my successor's calendar either in one fell swoop or one by one if needed without having to recreate them - with the end result that those invites come from her calendar and she receives the notice if somebody cancels/declines/etc. Is there a way to do this? My googlefu is failing me.
posted by joannemerriam to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Best answer: The easiest solution is for your IT department to give your successor access to your mailbox in their Outlook so they can see calendar activity as well as any stray emails that still come to you that need to be handled. Once the meetings expire, the new person can then just re-issue the invies from their own calendar and likely your mailbox can then be removed and/or archived. At a previous job, where we had a fair number of revolving admin assistants, we set up Exchange to only allow meetings to be scheduled out for six months rather than indefinitely, so that this would be less of an issue every time someone new came along. Some IT departments are more able/willing to do stuff like this than others, but it's in their court. Anything else will turn into a hot mess.
posted by briank at 10:38 AM on April 24 [6 favorites]

Of course, if you are just transerring to a new job in the same university and still need your mailbox, that probably won't be a viable solution at all.
posted by briank at 10:39 AM on April 24

I recently looked into this due to staffing changes at my own company and I don't think there is a way to do it. Your IT could give her control of your email account and calendar and set filters to forward things to her inbox, but other wise you would have to set an end date for recurring items and cancel one-offs and then have her send out new ones for everything.
posted by velocipedestrienne at 10:41 AM on April 24

Can you delegate your calendar to the successor, and have them migrate to new invites over time?
posted by wenestvedt at 10:44 AM on April 24

Briank has it. The answer is: _you_ don't. Your IT department does.
posted by mhoye at 10:54 AM on April 24 [1 favorite]

Is this Outlook? Outlook has numerous settings for managing calendars that are usually configured by the person whose calendar is being scheduled. They can add additional administrators who can get replies etc. It's incredibly common for people to have multiple staff members able to do scheduling. IT can help but normally this isn't something IT has to do for you. However if you've been scheduling through your own personal calendar yeah I guess IT will need to get involved, hopefully to set up an account that isn't a personal account to do all of this through in the future.
posted by ch1x0r at 5:49 AM on April 25

Best answer: Having been through this exact scenario, I don't think there is a way other than your successor recreating the meetings. When I started this job a couple years ago, I moved from another department and my predecessor added me to all the continuing calendar invites. Then the two of us together figured out which ones ended when and I created a note for myself to start over. This was made easier by the fact that some academic shared governance things get recreated every year in the fall anyway, so there was a natural lapse. You should talk to IT about it just in case there is an easier solution, but we couldn't find one.
posted by mygothlaundry at 12:41 PM on April 25

Response by poster: Thanks, everybody.
posted by joannemerriam at 6:08 PM on April 26