| Einstein Activity Capture and other third-party calendar sync tools must be turned off before turning on the event sync for Microsoft Calendar Sync. If not turned off, it will trigger event notification emails to be sent to clients. For instructions on disabling, please consult our Disabling Calendar Sync Tools article. If you have any questions, please reach out to your CSM or our Practifi Support Team. |
Overview
Microsoft 365 Calendar Sync is a one-way sync that brings events from your Microsoft calendar into Practifi. When this sync is enabled in your firm's Practifi organization, you can view your calendar in Practifi and have confidence that you are seeing your entire schedule.
This article outlines the steps to enable Microsoft 365 Calendar Sync in your organization. For more information about the Microsoft 365 calendar sync, please consult our Using Microsoft 365 Calendar Sync article.
**Note: This content is intended for system administrators and is technical in nature. Please discuss your integration installation plans with your Practifi Customer Support Team for their assistance.*
- Before You Begin
- Enablement Process
- Enabling Event Sync
- Sync Settings
- Syncing Event Locations
- Sync Considerations
- Practifi Protect Compatibility
- Troubleshooting Sync Errors
- Customization Considerations
Before You Begin
This calendar sync is part of our Microsoft 365 Sync, a paid add-on feature. Please note that the number of users granted access must be the same as the number of licenses in your Practifi contract. Contact your Client Success Manager to discuss pricing in more detail and sign up for the service. You will not be able to enable this functionality in your organization without purchasing this add-on.
Enablement Process
The majority of the enablement steps for Microsoft 365 Calendar Sync are identical to the steps for enabling Microsoft 365 Email Sync, with additional steps for enabling event sync and configuring sync settings. These are described in the sections below. To begin the enablement process, System Administrators should complete the steps described in our Enabling Microsoft 365 Email Sync article before proceeding to the next section of this article.
Enabling Event Sync
| Important: Microsoft 365 Calendar Sync uses the Microsoft Graph API to access your firm's Microsoft Cloud services. Due to the nature of the Microsoft Graph API, any update made to a past or future calendar event from Practifi to Microsoft Outlook will automatically trigger Microsoft Outlook to send an updated event invitation to all attendee inboxes. For this reason, we recommend Administrators examine all potential risks before enabling the calendar sync feature. Enabling event sync without careful consideration may result in unwanted event invitations, updates or cancellations being sent to end clients. |
To enable event sync for users, navigate to the Users & Mailboxes tab of the Microsoft 365 Sync page within the Settings app. The Sync Events option appears as a column in the User table alongside Sync Emails. Check the box for each user you would like to enable the feature for. To save time, you can check the box in the header row beside Sync Events to select all users listed.
If a user is linked to more than one mailbox—for example, if they're the nominated user for a shared mailbox—then you'll need to select which mailbox is their Primary Mailbox. This is the mailbox whose Microsoft 365 calendar will be used for any of that user's Events created in Practifi and also the email address from which Event invitations will be sent.
Once you've checked the box beside each user that you would like to use the Microsoft 365 calendar sync, select Save to finalize your changes.
Sync Settings
Once the users have been enabled, you can modify sync settings to suit your firm's needs. On the Sync Settings tab, scroll down to locate the Event Settings section. Within this section, you can modify settings by toggling the different event setting options on and off. The options available are as follows:
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Sync Internal Events: An internal event is one that’s only attended by team members who are also Practifi users. Enable this setting if your firm uses Practifi as an internal business management solution.
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Delete Synced Events: Choose whether or not to delete events from Practifi when they are deleted in Microsoft 365. If you select Yes, events deleted in Microsoft 365 will be removed from Practifi.
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Sync Private Events: Certain events are marked as private by their organizers in Practifi or Microsoft 365. Choose whether to include these in your firm’s sync.
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Sync Unmatched Events: All events in synced calendars will appear in Practifi, even if they aren’t related to any records. Enable this setting if your firm uses Practifi as its primary calendaring solution.
Once you have modified the settings to suit your firm's needs, select Save to finalize your changes.
Syncing Event Locations
Syncing Event locations between systems is supported in Practifi as Resource Calendars, which surface the location as a “resource” with its own calendar, allowing it to be managed as a typical meeting room.
Please note that in order for this sync to occur, administrators must first recreate your Microsoft 365 locations as Resource Calendars, with names identical to those found in Microsoft 365. To avoid sync conflicts, Microsoft 365 locations must have unique names.
Sync Considerations
When syncing Events, the following should be considered:
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Attachments - Event attachments are currently unsupported.
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Data imports - Importing events into Practifi is unsupported; only events created in the Practifi UI will be synchronized with Microsoft 365. This is by design, as any calendar event synchronized with Microsoft 365 causes invitations to be sent. In a typical import scenario, this isn’t desired.
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Draft events - Draft events in Microsoft 365 won’t appear in Practifi. To sync them, they must first be saved as confirmed calendar entries.
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Maximum attendees - Only 50 attendees are synced per Event. If more than 50 exist, then the first 50 are selected alphabetically.
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Private events - Supported in both directions, but without attendees.
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Secondary user calendars - This is not currently supported functionality; only the user’s default calendar will be synced.
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Shared calendars - Only personal calendars are currently supported.
Practifi Protect Compatibility
Practifi Protect and Microsoft 365 Calendar Sync can be enabled at the same time. However, the encryption introduced by Practifi Protect prevents Microsoft 365 Sync’s record matching logic from operating. This means that firms cannot encrypt the below fields if they want to make use of them in the matching process:
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Email (Contact)
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Alternative Email (Contact)
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Other custom email fields on Contact
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Email (User)
This guidance is taken from Salesforce Help, and is one of the trade-offs inherent in enabling Salesforce Shield, the technology behind Practifi Protect.
Troubleshooting Sync Errors
Logs & Errors
The Logs & Errors tab allows you to check the sync history, which shows when the sync was processed, which object was processed and the results. You can also retry failed sync records by clicking the Retry link.
Advanced Settings
You can modify the settings for the Microsoft 365 Calendar Sync, which can help with fine-tuning sync performance and mitigating some sync issues. To modify sync settings:
- Navigate to the Salesforce Setup page by clicking the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner of the page and select Setup.
- Use the Quick Find on the left-hand side to search for “Custom Settings” and select the Custom Settings option within the Custom Code menu. The Custom Settings page opens.
- On the Custom Settings list, select the Manage link next to Microsoft Integration Settings.
- On the Microsoft Integration Settings page, you can modify the following settings to improve performance:
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Event Sync Batch Size: The number of users/mailboxes to be included in the sync simultaneously. Larger numbers will result in parallel processing. However, the expected time for each mailbox to be in sync will be longer. We recommend keeping this number small for the initial sync and changing back to a larger number for ongoing sync. The default value is 20.
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Event Sync Maximum DML Rows: The number of Event and Event Relation records allowed to be inserted/updated in each transaction. The default value is 2,000 and the recommended maximum is 4,000. We recommend reducing this number if your organization has custom triggers on the Event object.
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Customization Considerations
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The following items have been modified by this feature. If your firm has customized them, then you’ll need to either copy the changes into your customized version or switch to the default version and redo your changes.
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