On syncing calendar meetings between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace

Microsoft 365, formerly known as Office 365, and Google Workspace are widely recognized office suites catering to businesses of all sizes. While each has its own advantages and disadvantages, this article aims to address a specific scenario where organizations or specific teams may need to utilize both solutions simultaneously. Managing emails from multiple mailboxes is relatively straightforward, but when it comes to synchronizing calendars and meetings between Outlook and Gmail, avoiding double-bookings and maintaining an organized calendar can become challenging.

To tackle this issue, SyncPenguin offers a practical solution. Our service enables seamless two-way synchronization of calendar bookings between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, supporting multiple users. In this blog post, we will guide you through the step-by-step process of setting up this synchronization to ensure smooth syncing of schedules across both platforms.

Create the sync in SyncPenguin Dashboard

All synchronizations are managed from our dashboard: https://dashboard.syncpenguin.com/. You can create a free account and start the trial at any time.

To set up a Microsoft and Google calendar sync, head to the Synchronizations section of the left menu and click + New sync. Then select Office 365 Calendar Meetings as the first service to sync, and Google Calendar Meetings as the second. After that select the sync direction, which in our case is Two-way.

If you plan to sync more than a dozen of users, we suggest creating the sync with domain-wide access. This will greatly simplify the setup process, as each individual user does not have to be manually and explicitly connected to the service. To indicate that your sync will be connected through domain-wide access, click Use domain-wide access? and then enable both the impersonation account for Office 365 and the service account for Google, as shown below. Then click Create sync.

Once the sync is created, you’ll see the main sync page with the following sections:

1. Sync settings. Basic sync settings like name, direction, update interval, etc.
2. Domain-wide access. Used to connect both Google and O365 accounts with domain-wide access.
3. Individual sync profiles. Here you’ll add actual users to the sync.
4. Field mapping & rules. Customize how data is mapped between M365 and Google meetings.
5. Sync history. See how updates you make to the calendar meetings are tracked and applied to the other calendar.

Let’s first connect both domain-wide access accounts.

Connect Google Workspace (service account)

To obtain access to Google Workspace user calendars, SyncPenguin uses Google service account. This is a special account that can be created by an admin and used by server-side applications to do work on behalf of the organization or users through official Google APIs. You can click Service account and then How to connect service account? to see the full instructions on how to create a service account, grant domain-wide access, and connect it to SyncPenguin.

A properly connected service account will be marked with a green Connected tag on the sync page.

Connect Microsoft 365 (impersonation account)

To get domain-wide access to Office 365 users, SyncPenguin uses impersonation account. This can be any O365 tenant user (usually admin) with impersonation permission enabled, which grants rights to access other users’ calendars through Microsoft APIs. You can read our full article on how to enable the impersonation permission here. Note that is permission is not enabled by default, even for the admin account.

Once the main account has the impersonation permission enabled, you can click on Impersonation account, and then the CONNECT button to authenticate and authorize the account in SyncPenguin.

A properly connected impersonation account will be marked with a green Connected tag. Please note that it usually takes up to an hour for a freshly enabled impersonation permission to propagate and actually start working.

Once both domain-wide access accounts are connected, you can proceed with adding users to the sync.

Add users to the sync

Note that SyncPenguin is not syncing all users by default. Instead, you need to explicitly add users to the sync and start syncing for them. You can add users one by one or in bulk. To add a single user, click the plus icon in the Individual sync profiles section, followed to Add manually. Then enter user name, followed by the valid and full email address in both Google and O365, as shown below.

To add users in bulk, enable Bulk create option when creating sync profile and enter sync profile names and emails in separate lines as shown below.

You can also add users through a CSV import, or bind users to a O365 and Google user group to auto-populate in SyncPenguin. Feel free to contact us in case of any questions or issues with user setup.

Start syncing

Once users are added you are ready to start syncing. This can also be done for each user individually, or in bulk by selecting users to start using checkboxes on the left.

When starting syncing you will be prompted with whether you want us to merge existing meeting data or not. In most common case, just select Merge all existing meetings two-way and click Merge and start tracking changes. Once the initial merge is completed, we will be watching both calendars (for each started user) for changes and syncing them accordingly. Any issues found while syncing will be marked red and shown in the Sync history section at the bottom of the sync page.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! We hope you find this article helpful when looking for a reliable and quick way to sync calendars between Google and Microsoft 365 organizations. If you have any questions about our product, feel free to contact us.