Flow to sync calendars

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone!

Im looking for a way to sync two outlook calendars & one google calendar the idea is:

I have three calendars

user@company1.com (O365)
user@company2.com (O365)
user@gmail.com

I'd like to sync the calendars so that both Outlook calendars add/modify/delete events to Google Calendar and to each other, is flow the best way to do this or perhaps there are some other ways to do it that i didnt come up with?

Thanks for all the help!

[thjeffri]

Hi Markie,

This is probably possible but it will get complicated.  At minimum, you will need three flows:

1. Triggered on "When an event is added, updated or deleted (V3)" for Outlook calendar 1.  Updates Outlook calendar 2 and Gmail calendar.
2. Triggered on "When an event is added, updated or deleted (V3)" for Outlook calendar 2.  Updates Outlook calendar 1 and Gmail calendar.
3. Triggered on "When an event is added, updated or deleted from a calendar" for Google calendar.  Updates Outlook calendars 1 and 2.

The reason this gets complicated is that the flows will probably end up triggering each other, creating a loop.  Therefore you would need to have some property on all 3 calendars that indicates if the particular item has already been synced or not.  

For example, if you had an "IsSynced" property that is true/false, after every flow's trigger you would want to have a condition that checks the value of IsSynced, and only run the rest of the flow if the value is false (thus preventing an infinite loop).  Each flow would need to have some step that sets the IsSynced property to true.

This is a challenge whenever you are setting up a two (or more) way sync with a flow.  If possible, it helps to have one data source (in this case, a calendar) that can serve as the "source of truth", and populate each of the other calendars in a one-way sync.  Doing so greatly simplifies the flow logic.

Please let me know if this helps.

Tom

[Anonymous]

Hi @thjeffri 

Thanks for your reply!

I've added a "master calendar" and excel file for X-Ref to store ID's of each event as you've suggested but there is one issue that i can't resolve

This is my calendar set up:

Outlook 1

Outlook 2

Google Calendar

Outlook 3 ( dev account )

I've created 3 flows:

1. Triggered on "When an event is added, updated or deleted (V3)" for Outlook calendar 1.  Updates Dev Calendar & saves ID in excel from Outlook1
2. Triggered on "When an event is added, updated or deleted (V3)" for Outlook calendar 2.  Updates Dev Calendar & saves ID in excel from Outlook 2
3. Triggered on "When an event is added, updated or deleted from a calendar" for Dev calendar.  Updates Outlook calendars 1 and 2 and Google Calendar and updates appropriate row with missing ID's

The thing is, when testing i've noticed that when i add an event to my calendar ( 1 or 2 ) it somehow gets triggered two or 3 times and adds multiple events to Dev Calendar which results in adding multiple events to Google Calendar and another Outlook calendar, any idea why it happens and how i could avoid it?

Thanks in advance!

[thjeffri]

Hi Markie,

It seems like you have a loop:

• An item is created on Outlook Calendar 1.
• This triggers flow #1, which creates an item on the dev calendar.
• This triggers flow #3, which creates an item on Outlook Calendar 1.
• This triggers flow #1 again, which creates another item on the dev calendar
• etc.

The same would apply to Outlook Calendar 2 and flow #2.  This is the issue with doing a two-way sync as I mentioned earlier.

Tom

[Fredrik_F]

Couldn´t you do a check if an event whit the same name already exists at the same time instead and if it does don´t add the event?