Since the beginning of June, CrewBrain has been offering the option of direct data exchange with Microsoft Office 365. The O365 sync is automatically available in all our Enterprise plans and enables direct data exchange with Office tools such as Microsoft Outlook and Teams.
The advantages of the new synchronization with Office 365 at a glance
The new synchronization with Microsoft Office 365 offers many advantages for CrewBrain users:
- Requests & bookings as well as vacation days are automatically transferred to Office 365 and kept up to date there.
- The data transfer runs within a short time (usually 1-2 minutes) for elements created in CrewBrain.
- The calendar items are transferred to any Outlook calendar (usually the user’s default calendar) and not to separate calendars as is the case with iCal subscriptions, for example
- The user always has an overview of his Outlook calendar in CrewBrain and dispatchers can immediately see who is available and when.
- Requested vacations are immediately “blocked” in Outlook so that no further appointments can be booked for this day, not only in CrewBrain but also in Outlook.
Setting up synchronization with Microsoft Office 365
To set up automatic synchronization, a corresponding app application for CrewBrain must first be created in Microsoft Azure. This must be done by an admin of the respective Microsoft tenant. Information on the process and the information to be stored can be found in our wiki articles on Office 365-Sync and Single-Sign-On with Microsoft Azure.
By the way: Customers who use synchronization with Office 365 also automatically have access to single sign-on with Microsoft Azure!
Create a link to the personal Outlook calendar
Each user must create the link to their personal Outlook calendar. To do this, the link is started at the touch of a button under My Account > Office 365 and the necessary authorizations are requested from Microsoft. The user can then select various options and configure the synchronization:
- Calendar: The default calendar is usually preselected. Alternatively, a different Outlook calendar can be selected as the destination.
- Send requests & bookings: this option is active by default. Within the option, however, you can choose whether booked and requested jobs or possibly only booked jobs should be transferred and whether vacation entries should be transferred.
- Retrieve appointments from O365: This option can be used to specify whether the appointments from the Outlook calendar should be displayed as external calendars in CrewBrain. The system automatically configures a corresponding external calendar in CrewBrain in the background, which can then also be used by dispatchers to check for overlaps.
Data is transferred to Office 365 within a few minutes when new requests, bookings or vacation entries are created. Data is currently still retrieved from Outlook at regular intervals every 3-4 hours, although we are already working on processing changes from Office 365 within a few minutes.
How you can try thee synchronization with Office 365 for 30 days
Do you already have a CrewBrain account? Then simply open the sync settings under My Account > Office 365. If any configurations are still necessary, the system will inform you. Otherwise, you can start the test straight away.
Even if you don’t have a CrewBrain account yet, it’s very easy:
- Sign up for the free test phase on our website.
- Get immediate access to CrewBrain and set up access for your team.
- Use the 30 days to try out all the functions and optimize your processes.
Offer valid until revoked. Not valid for existing accounts. Please make sure that you only register your demo version via this link. If the longer trial period is not automatically assigned to your account within 3 days, simply contact us by e-mail or telephone.
This post is also available in de_DE.
