Why Outlook Scheduling Assistant Shows Free When You Are Booked on Google

Your coworker creates an invite in Outlook. They open Outlook Scheduling Assistant to inspect your availability.

The grid displays an open white row across your hour. That hour is already booked on your Google Calendar.

Your coworker assumes you are available. They send the meeting invite without checking with you first.

Outlook Scheduling Assistant does not display an alert. It renders a clean status indicating open availability.

The tool works as intended inside your Microsoft 365 tenant. It queries your Exchange mailbox and reports zero conflicts.

Your coworker relies on this screen. It is the default scheduling tool in their corporate workflow.

You receive an invite for a time you already committed elsewhere. Declining creates tension because your schedule looked clear.

Accepting requires moving your commitment on Google Calendar. You must explain why your corporate calendar showed open time.

Google Calendar and Microsoft 365 are separate environments. They do not share calendar databases by default.

When you accept an invite on Google Calendar, Google writes that record to its own servers. It does not send that event to your Microsoft 365 tenant.

Microsoft 365 does not crawl external Google accounts for updates. Outlook Scheduling Assistant queries your Exchange mailbox directly.

The query searches your mailbox for items marked Busy, Tentative, or Out of Office. It finds no entry for that one hour.

Corporate security settings also prevent automatic updates. IT administrators restrict outside services from modifying your primary calendar.

An external calendar cannot write items to your mailbox without authorization. Your Exchange calendar remains completely clear.

The free/busy engine depends on local entries in the corporate tenant. An empty hour resolves to free availability.

Your Google event exists on another service. Outlook reads its own database and reports no conflict.

Sending an external booking link does not solve this problem. Coworkers inside your company schedule meetings through Outlook Scheduling Assistant.

Internal team members rarely use booking links for colleagues. They book directly over your Google meetings instead.

Subscribing to an internet calendar using an ICS feed also fails. Exchange stores subscribed ICS feeds as secondary calendars.

Outlook Scheduling Assistant ignores secondary calendars entirely during free/busy lookups. It only evaluates your primary mailbox calendar.

Importing an ICS file manually creates outdated records. A manual import captures past meetings but ignores upcoming schedule adjustments.

You must export and import files repeatedly to stay current. A missed update leaves an open slot on your primary calendar.

Blocking time by hand each morning is fragile. You must create duplicate events on Outlook for every Google meeting.

When a Google meeting moves, you must update Outlook manually. Forgetting that update creates an opening coworkers will take.

You must place a real event on your primary calendar in your Microsoft 365 tenant. The Exchange free/busy engine detects that record immediately.

Outlook Scheduling Assistant reads the record and marks that hour as unavailable. Coworkers then see a blocked slot across your row.

The event must use the Busy status. Outlook supports states like Free, Working Elsewhere, Tentative, and Busy.

An event set to Free still allows coworkers to schedule over it. Setting the status to Busy reserves the hour.

OnlyBusy reads the Google event and writes a Busy placeholder on your Microsoft 365 primary calendar. Current plans are on the OnlyBusy pricing page.

OnlyBusy reads your Google Calendar and creates a placeholder on your Microsoft 365 primary calendar. It hides your personal titles and client notes.

Your coworkers see an unavailable block in Outlook Scheduling Assistant. When an event moves on Google, your Microsoft 365 placeholder updates automatically.