Summary
Enable Glean to query Outlook / Microsoft 365 calendars (via Graph API) for free/busy and meeting details for other users, honoring their existing sharing permissions. This would allow users to coordinate meetings and understand meeting load without leaving Glean, and allow managers (with employee consent) to see high‑level meeting analytics.
Problem
Right now, Glean cannot query even free/busy time for someone else’s Outlook calendar, regardless of what calendar sharing permissions are set.
As a result:
- Users must leave Glean and open Outlook/Graph-backed tools to find mutually available times.
- Managers and team leads cannot use Glean to understand high-level calendar utilization (e.g., how much time is spent in meetings, 1:1s, etc.), even when they already have appropriate delegated access in Outlook.
- This breaks the “stay in Glean” workflow for scheduling and meeting analysis.
Customer Use Case(s)
- Scheduling and coordination
- A user is planning a cross-functional meeting and wants to quickly check mutual availability for 5–10 stakeholders from within a Glean workflow (e.g., while drafting a project plan or email in Glean Assistant).
- Today they must alt‑tab into Outlook or another scheduling tool to see free/busy, then come back to Glean to continue their work.
- Manager/lead visibility (with consent)
- A manager wants to understand how much time their direct reports spend in recurring meetings, 1:1s, and large group sessions to identify overload and improve team health.
- They already have delegated calendar access in Outlook (per employee consent), but Glean cannot surface even high-level statistics, so they cannot use Glean as a single place to reason about work patterns.
- Agent- and workflow-based scheduling
- A Glean Agent is helping a user “find a time next week for a 30‑minute sync with my team.”
- The agent could propose options directly if Glean could read appropriate free/busy information via Graph, but today it has no visibility.
Proposed Solution
Leverage Microsoft Graph Calendar API to allow Glean to query calendar information for other users, strictly honoring Outlook’s existing sharing permissions. Specifically, support the three common Outlook sharing levels:
- “Can view when I’m busy” →
AvailabilityOnly- Glean can see free/busy blocks only, with no subject or location, and use that to propose times or visualize availability.
- “Can view titles and locations” →
LimitedDetails- Glean can see time + subject + location of events (no body), enabling higher‑quality scheduling suggestions (e.g., avoiding overlapping travel meetings) and simple categorization (e.g., 1:1 vs. group meeting based on title).
- “Can view all details” →
Reviewer- Glean can see full details of non‑private items (read‑only), enabling richer analytics and workflows where appropriate (e.g., understanding how many hours are spent in specific types of meetings while still respecting private events).
Key requirements:
- Respect all existing Outlook/Graph privacy and sharing controls, including private events.
- Make this behavior opt‑in and clearly governed in Admin / security configuration.
- Provide primitives that Agents and experiences (e.g., Glean Assistant) can call to:
- Suggest meeting times based on multi-person free/busy.
- Summarize calendar load (hours/week, meeting type breakdown).
- Answer questions like “Do I have time for a 60‑minute deep work block on Thursday?”
Impact
- User productivity: Users stay in Glean for end‑to‑end workflows (reasoning + scheduling) instead of context‑switching to Outlook solely to check availability.
- Manager and team health insights: With consent-based access, managers can use Glean to see high‑level meeting load patterns (e.g., % of time in 1:1s vs. large group meetings) and act on burnout risk or process issues.
- Stronger Agents and automation: Agents can reason about time and meetings as first-class signals, improving use cases like scheduling, planning, and load-balancing across teammates.
- Better alignment with existing Microsoft investment: Customers already rely on Outlook/Graph permissions; this feature lets Glean honor and reuse that model instead of forcing parallel calendars or manual workarounds.
