[Backburner ⏳] Import Outlook Calendar meetings to Wrike

Interesting idea. 

@Steve welcome to the forums 🤗 ! It's not on the shortterm roadmap right now, but we love hearing new ideas like this. 

Yes, I also see some efficiency that would be gained from this feature. Please give this some prioritized consideration. It will show more anticipation of the user needs rather than internal driven priorities.  Dare I say "Customer Centric"!!!

Hi Justin, thanks for posting!

Like all suggestions posted in this section of the Community, the Product Team will review the thread when they're reviewing enhancements to the feature. 

The detail and ideas posted here provide the team with great value and suggestions here have driven change on countless occasions, so thank you for taking the time to add your input, we really appreciate it 🙌

Any updates, I'll be sure to post back here.

It would be extremely helpful to have Wrike sync with our Outlook Calendars.

Since Wrike is a planning tool, if it could acknowledge an existing calendar (and availability) to help schedule tasks this would be beneficial. For example, if an Outlook sync existed and I needed to schedule tasks for my teams, but they have a training already scheduled (marked as busy) for 4 hours on a Tuesday, it would show that time in Wrike as unavailable also, and so it would not consider that time in task assignment.

Most of our task assignments do not take a full day (8 hours).  I know that is how Wrike is currently focused, which is makes the system very challenging to use at times.  This is also a challenge in scheduling work since not all of our employees work 8 hour days.

Dear Wrike Team,

we are also seriously considering adopting Wrike to boost up our PM efficiency but

final decision hasn't been taken yet since we are still vetting which tool best suits our needs.

A full integration of Outlook calendar into Wrike will be a decisive factor when we as a team will vote which

tool we will subscribe for

Thank you 

Wrike Team,

This is an actual issue with our planning tool for our development team.  We need to double the information coordinating meeting with the outlook calendar and our wrike task. If we would have this synch, our success rate of users would be better.

thx u

Hi all,

we struggle a lot with this. We have to duplicate all the tasks.

first wrike task has no due time that is important to schedule every meeting, second would be extremely important add capability to create wrike task ad automatically see it in outlook calendar.

the overlapping of calendars is not a solution.

Every company works with MS outlook and shares calendars.

please review your priority in improving the product.

thanks all

Hi absolutely agree with you, Giulio!!!

This must be a priority.

Hi - I'd also love to see better integration between wrike and outlook calendars so we can schedule our wrike tasks in and around our outlook schedules. 

Please add this functionality to the short-term roadmap.  This would greatly enhance ease of use and adoption within our organization.  I also agree that it should look at the meeting duration and set the task/activity in Wrike accordingly.  Furthermore, it should automatically "enable effort." 

Thank you!

Hi @Everyone, thanks for your continued input here 🙂 All your feedback is passed to our Product team, and upvotes of the original suggestion by @Steve help them assess its popularity among Wrike users. For now, I don't have an update to share with you, but I'll get back to you when I have news. Once the suggestion hits 60 votes, we'll add one of the Product Feedback statuses to it.

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

I would love to import my outlook calendar into Wrike. Then I can see my all meetings and task in one platform which will allow me to better task schedule.

The ability to import our outlook calendar into Wrike would be a time save. Currently we have meetings that do no reflect in Wrike. As we assign out projects and tasks to team members it would be awesome to see their workload in a holistic view, where sure they may have 4 hours allotted to a specific task and their workload looks as though I can assign them 4 more hours -when in reality they will be sitting in 4 hours worth of meetings. 

Please, please consider giving this a go.

I keep getting multiple requests from our team members for Outlook calendar integration; and for it to include ability to "enable effort" across the board so that whether in the app, the email integration, or the future calendar integration... that we should also be able to enable effort at the same time.  

Thanks!

I agree with all the folks out here! We have regularly scheduled, billable meetings with our clients that are "work" and should be considered in resourcing and effort reports. We have to build those from scratch.

Also, if I could schedule the 2 hours assigned to me for a task and hold time on my Outlook calendar to actually get my Wrike tasks done without duplicating that in Outlook, that would be fabulous! Plan the work, work the plan...

The request for this long awaited integration was finally passed on to the product team. See/follow this post for updates: https://help.wrike.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360026469513-Outlook-Calendar-Integration-?page=2#comments

Hi Camille, where did you get this information?  The link provided simply goes to a note from the Community Team saying it was passed on but there are no updates.

Hi Angi,

I received the information from the post you are referring to. Though there are no updates now, the Community Team says "as soon as that changes we'll be back in touch here 👍". 

I have numerous user complaints about the difficulty of simultaneously maintaining two calendars: Outlook Calendar and Wrike.

Both are essential to performing one's work duties, but Outlook Calendar bookings aren't visible in Wrike, and vice versa.

Still, one must consult Outlook Calendar in order to schedule one's Wrike schedule, and vice versa one must consult Wrike in order to decide on accepting or declining Outlook Calendar events.

Reserving block(s) of time for a task in Wrike would need to be displayed as "busy" in Outlook Calendar, so that reservation is respected when others in the user's company/department/team are organizing meetings, workshops, all hands meetings, etc.

Also, when users reserve vacation time and other out of office events in Outlook Calendar, those should be displayed in Wrike, both for the users themselves, when they schedule tasks themselves, or someone else () schedules tasks for internal resources.

Everyone's Outlook Calendar contains meetings, workshops, all hands meetings, vacations and other out of office events that affect their availability, but in Wrike a resource's Outlook Calendar bookings are invisible (except if the Wrike user really maintains a duplicate of their Outlook Calendar in Wrike - which is too much to ask of any employee). Which means that e.g. project managers or team principals can't respect the resource's existing bookings, and leads to an unacceptable amount of back and forth between the one doing the resourcing/scheduling and the resources themselves.

Wrike’s “My To Do” task list should show up as a calendar you can subscribe to in Outlook Calendar. And the user's Outlook Calendar bookings should be made visible in Wrike's various views, where the user's available time is being booked for performing project tasks.

Thank you for your detailed feedback Tuomo Suominen! It's on our team's radar, and we'll be sharing updates in this thread in the future 👍 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

100% agree Tuomo Suominen Makes Wrike almost irrelevant if I have to mix calendars. Maybe Microsoft should just do better on their side to be project relevent because I'm sure they make it hard for developers.

Any updates on this topic?

Hi Luigi Lotti, welcome to the Community. Thank you for your question! Recently, we have added a new action in automation that allows you to create events in Outlook Calendar, you can find more info about this option here. 

Also, there are two available paid add-ons available to integrate Wrike with Outlook Calendar:

1- Wrike Sync, which you can use to configure what events to create in Outlook Calendar based on Wrike items. You can find additional information about this option here. 

2- Wrike Integrate, very useful for performing low code transformations to achieve almost any automation you need.

If you are interested in any of these options, please let me know 🙂

Would you please confirm if one of these options could be what you are looking for? 

Lastly, I'd like to mention that you can check our New to Community forum to discover all the resources you can find in our Community 👍

Hello Juan,

and thank you for your reply. It seems that this new automation action solves the issue of copying in Outlook Calendar something that already exists in Wrike. The remaining part would be to "import" Outlook Calendar entries as tasks in Wrike (avoiding double creation of the same task of course).

From what I see no current option solves this point, but maybe I am missing something. Could you please confirm?

Hi Luigi Lotti, this should be possible with Wrike Integrate. Would you like me to put you in touch with our team to discuss in more detail? 

Elaine Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Elaine Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

My two cents:  If for nothing else, it would be helpful to have outlook meetings show up in workload as time spent in the day.  When I'm trying to figure out who has time for a task, I may be overloading someone inadvertently because they have 4 hours worth of meetings that day.

Jay Bradford that can become dangerous. In our tasks meeting time is calculated as part of the task. So you do not knw exactly when the person is in the meeting, but the time is already blocked. That would mean double time blocking if you automatically calculate meeting as booked time (without the corresponding task).

Sven Passinger Good point.  But we have ongoing meetings that don't contribute to any actionable task (unfortunately).  That is what I was thinking about mainly.