Synchronize your Exchange meetings, appointments & tasks to stay up to date, organized, and better manage staff availability with Accelo calendar sync.
Using this guide, you can:
- Connect your Accelo and your Exchange/Office365 calendars
- Scheduled Activities in Accelo push into your calendar
- Outlook Appointments
Connect your Accelo & Exchange / Microsoft 365
To sync your Exchange or Microsoft 365 Calendar, you must first connect your Accelo with your Exchange email or Microsoft 365 accounts.
To enable Exchange/Microsoft 365 Calendar sync:
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Click your User Profile Icon on the Navigation bar and select Integrations option.
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Select Microsoft Exchange and scroll down to Calendar Sync
The Exchange integration will sync the following calendar events:
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Meetings created in Accelo - Meetings created in Accelo will be pushed into your Outlook calendar.
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Outlook Meetings - Any meeting created in your Outlook calendar will be pulled into your Accelo schedule. These meetings will be displayed as either team-visible Meetings or private External Events, based on the attendees.
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Outlook Appointments - Any appointments with multiple attendees created from your Outlook calendar will be pulled into your Accelo schedule. Appointments which do not include other attendees (such as time you've blocked out for lunch) will not be synced. Synced appointments will be displayed as either team-visible Meetings or private External Events based on the attendees involved.
NOTE: Marking a calendar event as Private in Outlook will cause Accelo to ignore the event during the sync.
Scheduled activities in Accelo push into your calendar
When adding an activity in Accelo, you can choose to schedule it to a specific date and time. Effectively you are creating a meeting (or appointment) so you can keep track of the attendees and later record the time spent in that appointment.
Note - If you add a contact email as an attendee when creating your meeting, they will only receive an invitation if you select the Send Invites flag.
To schedule a meeting:
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Click the New Activity dropdown and select Schedule a Meeting.
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A popup will appear where you can enter the meeting details, such as attendees, subject, location, date, and time. Be sure to hit the Send Invites flag if you wish to send out email invitations to all attendees.
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Click Create from the bottom of the screen to complete scheduling the activity; immediately all attendees will get a copy of the activity via email - just like any other activity.
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With your Exchange Integration enabled, this activity will also shortly appear in your calendar.
Outlook appointments appear in your Accelo schedule
Your appointments/events in your Exchange schedule, such as in Outlook Calendar, will be pulled into Accelo and shown on your schedule screen.
NOTE: Accelo does not sync your all-day appointments. We exclude these as they would make it hard to integrate into your scheduling tool and make it hard to manage your time.
Simply create an appointment in Outlook (or your calendar program) and within a couple of minutes, you will see it in Accelo.
Your Exchange Appointments will appear on your Timesheet page. When the meeting or appointment is with a client, also known in Accelo as Scheduled Work, you'll see a suggestion for the amount of time the meeting had scheduled. You simply click on the suggestion, adjust it for the actual amount of time you spent in the meeting, and put in a short description of what was covered in the meeting.
An hour-long meeting will also block one hour from your Accelo Schedule on that day, which gives you a better idea of availability and workload.
If the appointment didn't involve a client, Accelo will import this time as External Work. While some things from your calendar don't belong on your timesheet, actual client work can be easily converted into a timesheet entry with a couple of clicks. Just search for the client, sale, project, ticket or other place you want to log the work, confirm the time spent and enter a short report, and your timesheet will be filled in.
For privacy purposes, other users looking at your schedule will be able to see these external appointments, but the name/title will simple say "External Appointment", rather than "Lunch with Andy" as you see it. You can see your External Appointment Subject and may click through to view all the details in your Calendar. You can then choose whether to record this appointment as an activity in Accelo.