Sharing an Outlook or Microsoft 365 calendar with your family
Work calendars are the hardest part of a family week, and not by accident. The calendar belongs to an employer, the entries have client names in them, and whether it can leave the organisation at all is a setting somebody else controls.
What Outlook's sharing does
Outlook and Microsoft 365 let you share a calendar with named people, at a level you choose: availability only, titles and locations, or full details (Microsoft). Someone else inside your organisation sees it in their own Outlook, and it stays current.
Outside the organisation is where it gets complicated.
An external person may not be allowed. Sharing beyond the tenant is governed by an administrator's sharing policy. In many companies it is off, or limited to availability only, and no setting on your side overrides it.
A published link is a different thing. Outlook can publish a calendar as an HTML page or an ICS link that anyone holding the address can read (Microsoft). It is read-only, refreshed on a schedule rather than instantly, and — being a link — it can be forwarded by anyone who has it.
The recipient has to use something that reads it. A partner on Google Calendar or an iPhone can subscribe to the ICS link, but it arrives as another calendar to check, not as part of a shared week.
Why this is the piece that usually breaks
The common household arrangement is that work stays out of the family calendar. That is a reasonable privacy choice with an unreasonable side effect: the family can no longer tell when that person is free. The calendar that most determines somebody's availability is the one nobody can see.
The other common arrangement — copying a few work commitments into the family calendar by hand — fails on exactly the ones that matter. A meeting that runs late, a trip that moves, a call that appears the same morning.
What you actually want
Not the titles. The shape of the day: which hours are gone, so a pick-up or a dinner can be planned around them.
Outlook has the concept — availability-only sharing — but it stops at the tenant boundary, and it does not put that availability next to the rest of the family's week.
How Alfie does it
Alfie is our product. Each person connects the account they already use, and sharing is set per calendar rather than per person.
Connect a Microsoft 365 or Outlook.com account and pick which calendars come in. Each one is then shared with the household at a level you choose: Full details, Busy only, or Hidden. A work calendar starts at busy only, so meetings appear as blocks with no title — the family sees that Thursday afternoon is gone without seeing whose review it is.
The same setting governs the assistant. Asked whether you are free on Thursday, it says you are busy and cannot say what the meeting is, because the filter sits in the query rather than in an instruction to be discreet.
Connected accounts sync both ways, so an event you add in Alfie on a work calendar is written to Outlook, where your colleagues' invitations already are. Alongside it the household week can carry a partner on Google or iCloud and children as profiles with no account of their own.
Whether your employer permits the connection is still their decision — Alfie connects with your own Microsoft sign-in, under whatever your administrator allows. What changes is that once it is connected, the family gets availability without detail, in the same week as everything else.
Try Alfie. It is free, and web-only for now.