Compass Education .ICS calender syncs to Outlook and Teams but in Teams all classes/lessons we teach are set to "Free"

Question

Compass Education .ICS calender syncs to Outlook and Teams but in Teams all classes/lessons we teach are set to "Free"

Anonymous

Our Diocese uses Compass Education to show timetables, mark students etc and all teachers have their lessons in Compass which is updated live if they get extra lessons etc.

From there we can get the teachers .ics file and upload it into Outlook which is syncing to Teams. The staff can see they are all accurate, however if the office staff get a phone call from a parent to transfer in teams, they cant\wont see the teacher as "busy" as its not visible to anyone else...

Unless the teacher tags themself as "busy" for that lesson in their calendar - they dont appear to be on a class.

All the information relevant to this on the web appeats to be old\changed and there are no add-ins to help anymore.

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Answer 1

Dear Mark Peterson5

Good day, hope this email finds you well

Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft forum community, pleasure to assist

Based on the above description, it seems like you're facing an issue where the .ICS calendar files from Compass Education sync to Outlook and Teams, but all the classes or lessons are marked as "Free" in Teams, i did further investigate investigation internally and we did notice by default, .ICS files often set events to "Free" unless explicitly marked otherwise.

This appears to be a design limitation in how .ICS files are handled during synchronization between Compass Education, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams. Specifically

-- ICS File Format: The .ICS file format often defaults to marking events as "Free" unless explicitly set to "Busy." This is a limitation of the file format and how it is interpreted by calendar applications

-- Outlook and Teams Sync: When Outlook syncs with Teams, it respects the "Show As" status of events (e.g., Free, Busy, Tentative). If the events are marked as "Free" in Outlook, they will also appear as "Free" in Teams

-- Compass Education Export: If Compass Education does not provide an option to set the default status of exported events to "Busy," this further limits the ability to automate the process

Additionally, the reason as to why this could be happening is because, the design assumes that users or administrators will manually adjust the status of events if needed. While this works for personal calendars, it creates challenges in organizational settings like yours, where accurate "Busy" statuses are critical for visibility.

I did discus with our online technical team, and they inform there could be workaround such as using a script to automatically change the status of all events imported from the .ICS file to "Busy". This will require raising support ticket to our online technical team to take you through step-by-step workaround as they have higher permission compared to us in Microsoft forum community.

kindly contact your organization admin or you can create this service request to report this symptom to our online channel through the M365 admin center if you have the permissions. A support agent can further connect with you remotely, for further troubleshooting and involve the backend team where need be. Get support for Microsoft 365 for business -- Online support. How to find your admin, please refer to How do I find my Microsoft 365 admin? - Microsoft Support

Incase i get more information on the above, i will revert back.

In the meantime, I would also like to invite community members and MVPs in the forum to share their knowledge or any workaround and insight on this topic.

Thanks for your precious time and your understanding would be highly appreciated.

Have a great day