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An AI reaches an Outlook calendar only through the sharing you actually granted.

With Kastel

The sharing you set on an Outlook calendar decides who can read it through an AI. A calendar you share with nobody is filed in no department and waits for an administrator's decision. Appointments marked personal, private or confidential are dropped before writing, and what remains comes in with its subject, its time, its location and its attendees.

A calendar you share with nobody has no audience

Outlook does not count a calendar's owner among the people that calendar is shared with. A calendar you have opened up to nobody therefore presents no audience to resolve, and your Kastel files it under no department. It waits for an administrator's decision, like any content whose audience stays undetermined.

That is the opposite of what people expect. A private calendar looks like the quietest case, and therefore the easiest one to open to an AI. Yet nothing in Outlook says which department its appointments belong to, and a machine that fills that gap by itself ends up filing your annual review under the sales team.

The corollary belongs to you. The day you share that calendar with colleagues in one department, its work appointments become readable by that department, and by it alone. The gesture that opens access stays a gesture you make in Outlook, checkable where you made it.

What your Outlook sharing produces

Every row can be checked at your end, by opening the sharing permissions of the calendar concerned in Outlook.

The sharing set on the calendarWhat your Kastel does with it
No sharing at allNo audience to resolve, so it waits for an administrator
Can view when I'm busyDoes not count as reading content, and widens nothing
Can view titles and locationsCounts as reading content, so that person joins the audience
Shared with people in one departmentFiled under that department, readable by it alone
Shared with people in two departmentsWaits for an administrator, and neither one gets it
Shared with My OrganizationNo address to resolve behind that grant, so it waits
Shared with a groupThe group is not expanded into people, so it waits
A delegate set on your calendarCounts as reading content, so the delegate joins the audience

There is only one test underneath these rows. Your Kastel files a calendar when its sharing names people it can attach to a single department, and it stops in every other case.

Work meetings, without the wordless slots

The boundary reads appointment by appointment, across every calendar the connected account can see.

What your Kastel reads in Outlook Calendar

  • The subject, time and location of each work appointment
  • The list of people invited
  • The preview of the appointment's body, reduced to plain text
  • The appointments in your secondary calendars, with no sorting on their name

What it never reads

  • An appointment marked personal, private or confidential in Outlook
  • A busy block or an all-day placeholder with no text at all
  • The files attached to an appointment, and the formatting of its body
  • An appointment the sort judges personal, even on a work calendar

No calendar is excluded on its name, and that is deliberate. A calendar called “Holiday campaign” is a work calendar, and discarding it because its name mentions holidays would lose its appointments in silence. The sorting happens appointment by appointment.

Three of Outlook's four sensitivity levels drop the appointment

Outlook offers four sensitivity levels on an appointment, and three of them are enough to drop it. An appointment marked personal, private or confidential is removed before a line is written, without its subject being examined and without being held anywhere in reserve.

The fourth level, the one set by default, is not a free pass. The appointment is then examined on the whole page it would produce, subject, time, location, attendee list and body included. A personal signal anywhere in that set drops the entire appointment.

That last point catches the most common case. An appointment called “Quick catch-up” says nothing personal in its subject. If it puts a medical practice and you in the same room, its attendees say it for it, and it is dropped on that ground alone.

The questions we get about this calendar

My assistant is a delegate on my calendar. Does that change anything?

Yes. A delegate counts as reading content, whether or not the delegation covers private items, so your assistant is part of that calendar's audience. If they sit in a different department from the colleagues you share the same calendar with, the calendar spans two departments, and it then waits for an administrator's decision.

An appointment vanished from my calendar after a reorganisation. Is it treated as deleted?

No. Microsoft distinguishes an appointment that was genuinely deleted from one that was merely removed from the view being tracked, and the connector reads that distinction rather than conflating the two. An appointment that is still alive and drops out of the view is not flagged as gone, and it stays tracked.

How far back does the first pass reach, and how far ahead?

One year back and one year ahead. Microsoft requires a window bounded on both sides to walk a calendar, where Google's calendar accepts a single bound and takes everything ahead of it. That constraint has a consequence that protects you, because an appointment sitting outside the window and missing from a reread is never counted as deleted.

Does this calendar need a new Microsoft application declared for it?

No, the connector reuses the one already serving Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, with a calendar-read authorisation added on top. Each employee connects their own calendar, and a calendar cannot be attached to anybody else. When the connected account maps to a different person from the one requested, the connection is refused before any key is stored.

What this connector does not do

It books nothing and moves nothing. The authorisation requested from Microsoft is a calendar-read authorisation, so the connector has no path to create an appointment, change one, or answer an invitation on your behalf.

From an appointment's body, the connector takes the preview Microsoft returns first, and it only goes down to the full body when that preview is empty. A long agenda therefore does not necessarily come in whole. Attached files never come in, and formatting is reduced to plain text.

An appointment already read that you switch to private afterwards is dropped from the following reads, which is the expected behaviour. What has already been written does not withdraw itself for all that, and it takes an erasure decided by an administrator to remove it from your Kastel.

An appointment deleted or cancelled in Outlook is not erased from your Kastel. It is marked there as gone at the source and kept, readable by the same people as before, until that erasure. The cancellation is itself a piece of management information, and the connector does not choose on its own to forget it.

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Other connectors in detail
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Mail received and sent, plus documents shared with named people.
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Channel messages only, and no channel readable company-wide.
Google Calendar
An appointment marked private never comes in, and the calendar's sharing decides.

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