Shared Mailboxes/Calendars

laurenoregan

Will Glean eventually have the ability to access content from shared mailboxes/calendars? Why is this a current limitation?

Gleanie Kat

Hi @laurenoregan - Thank you for this question! I added the "Feedback and Ideas" tag to allow other users to upvote the need for this here to provide feedback to product. Here's some context on why these aren't supported and some ideas/workarounds:

​​What’s technically limiting SharedMailboxes/Calendars today (Outlook and Google)

• Correct permission modeling for shared artifacts (shared mailboxes/calendars) is the blocker. For Outlook shared mailboxes specifically, Microsoft Graph does not expose mailbox‑level ACLs in a way that lets us safely compute “who can see what,” so we can’t index those mailboxes without risking overexposure. This is why shared mailboxes aren’t supported today.
• Outlook calendar parity is not there yet in chat/agents. You can see events on the homepage surface, but searching Outlook calendar events from chat/agents isn’t reliably supported. Glean's current workaround relies on the Microsoft Teams connector to crawl events/transcripts, not a native Outlook calendar crawl.
• Google Calendar is supported via our native Google Calendar action, but this is separate from Outlook’s path. Outlook calendar relies on the Teams connector today, which is why these two providers don’t have identical behavior.

How we’re addressing this in product strategy

• Outlook shared mailboxes: We’re tracking this as an internal feature request and will pursue it when we can guarantee correct end‑user permissions using Graph (or equivalent) without custom mapping. The limitation is explicitly due to Graph not returning the permission objects we need for shared mailboxes. We encourage our Outlook users to bring this up as a Feature Request with Microsoft.
• Outlook calendar: We’re improving the Microsoft path by leveraging the Teams connector for events/transcripts first and are tracking a dedicated work item for Outlook calendar event access/search in agents.
• Google calendar: Native Google Calendar is GA for agent's Calendar Search. We’re continuing enablement and documentation so admins can self‑serve it cleanly.

Pragmatic workarounds teams are using today

• Shared mailbox content: Route or export the needed messages into a storage system Glean already indexes and enforces permissions on (e.g., SharePoint/OneDrive or Google Drive). This keeps authorization anchored in the source system while making the content discoverable in Glean. 
• Outlook search in agents: Use the Outlook Search action with query filters like subject or category (folder filtering and shared‑mailbox selection aren’t supported). If messages are CC’d to a shared address (e.g., legal@domain ), you can search by that address.
• Outlook calendar use cases: Set up the Microsoft Teams connector and enable event crawling; that’s what powers Calendar Search for Microsoft today, including meeting summaries. Be aware of current limitations noted in our documentation.