Why Outlook Scheduling Assistant shows you as free

Scheduling Assistant looks at calendars inside the Microsoft 365 tenant where the meeting is being planned. It marks an hour free when those calendars have no conflicting Busy event.

It does not open a booking link, and it does not look at a calendar in a different company.

A board meeting on client A's tenant is an event in client A's directory. Client B's Scheduling Assistant cannot see it. Your personal Google calendar is the same kind of gap.

You look free. The hold arrives after you are already booked.

Adding an ICS subscription gives that Outlook a second calendar it polls. The subscription is often drawn as an overlay, and Scheduling Assistant often leaves it out when it decides free or busy.

A poll that refreshes every 6 to 24 hours also lags a meeting you just accepted. The guide on ICS feeds goes further on that delay.

A native event on the calendar in that tenant is something Scheduling Assistant already knows how to read. Mark it Busy and the hour is taken.

OnlyBusy writes that event, private, with the label you chose for that calendar. Google and Microsoft push the change, so the block follows the source event.

The title, guests, notes, and location stay on the calendar where the meeting was created. OnlyBusy reads the title so you can see your own event, and it does not store that title.

Disconnect the calendar and OnlyBusy removes the blocks it created and deletes the stored tokens.

• Why a subscribed ICS feed does not count as Busy
• Block time across separate Microsoft 365 tenants
• OnlyBusy vs Calendly